The artist Edward Hopper once made a statement concerning the lively future of American Painting, "Painting must deal with life and nature's phenomena to become great". This is the underlying theme that I acknowledge to be the spring board of my work. I am deeply and personally committed to the unique expression of nature in order to understand and redefine our connective web of human experience.

In the traditional artistic vision of the landscape we are constantly reminded of the uniqueness of place, intimacy of nature, and or the vastness of space. For me, landscape is an arena where the attitudes, concerns and methods of civilization show clearly upon the treatment of its surface. The locations or views that I paint are consciously meant to become important spiritual places.  In D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, he states, "different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibrations, different chemical exhalation, different polarity, with different stars. Call it what you like. But the Spirit of Place is a great reality". 

Many of us are familiar with well known places of spirit or rather sacred places; these sites include Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, Machu Pichu and the Cathedral at Chartres. But sacred sites do not have to be famous locations they can be found everywhere; we have collective sacred places and personal ones as well. Each of these has common characteristics by which we experience the shift of consciousness. All we have to do is walk up to or into a place-location and if we exhibit even the slightest bit of openness, we begin to feel different, more than ourselves. We feel physically at one with everything around us and with the whole of creation, a sensation that fills us with inner security and well-being and even wisdom.

Also important to me, in an elemental sense, are the skills of observation, the perfect pitch of color, and the dynamic organization of the image on the canvas or paper.  My style dances between painterly realism and expressionistic naturalism.  The studies and a few larger finished paintings are created on location. It is critical that I participate in the meeting, the "real living" of my personal sacred places.  Later in the studio I reference these studies along with photos, sketches and slides to flesh out the wholeness, harmony and radiance of these collective metaphors as they are retranslated to larger sized canvases.

My paintings are invitations to reflection and are meant as a contribution towards our "self-knowledge" rather than a strategy for the public veneration of nature. It is not my desire to express a blatant dogma, or political statement on the viewer about human relationship to landscape; instead I seek to display a visual eye for the viewer's personal revelation or insight.

"It is in vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. There is
none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of
Nature in us, that inspires that dream."

Journal of Henry David Thoreau, August 30, 1856