Artist's Statement

My first love was poetry, and I paint from the same place. As a graduate student I studied the surrealists and abstract expressionists, which led to further excursions into visual art, until finally I began doing scholarly work on American landscape painting and adjuncting in art history at various colleges. At some point I just picked up some paints brushes and found a new calling.

I have always been drawn to what I think of as the indeterminate or "mystical moods" of nature: twilights, mists, deep woods, moonlight, dusk, dawn. My paintings are meant to express such moods. Therefore I tend toward a "Tonalist" palette.

I am interested in the poetic beauty that can be coaxed from the interaction with the landscape and also in the vital forms of artistic expression that have emerged over the 20th and 21st centuries. I believe, with German artist Gerhard Richter, that "nature, in all its forms, is always against us because it knows no meaning," and that "every beauty that we see in landscape, every enchanting color effect, every tranquil scene..." is a projection. But I also believe that for this same reason, we absolutely must pursue "every beauty" wherever it can be found. Because, as even Richter admits, "we are still capable of producing a spark of hope which we can also call love." I hope my paintings convey something of this, and even something of what cannot be put into words, even in poetry.