August 10, 2013   

My large paintings derive from landscape imagery. Even the figurative paintings are as much about the space as they are about the figurative elements. The small still lifes are not just paintings of flowers, they are studies of volumes of space. I started painting landscapes in Philadelphia and then eventually discovered the pine barrens of south central New Jersey. The pine barrens area is full of steams and ponds, so my plein air paintings often took on the symmetry of reflected landscape forms. This has transferred to the large paintings too. But the paintings are more than landscape imagery. Texture, color, light, space, symmetry, scale, edge and emergence are all important visual elements. Beyond their iconography, the paintings are also as much about process as they are about image. The process of pushing an image from state to state gives the work an emergent quality and visual complexity. The push is a very physical process, the paintings reflect that physicality.