In the process of painting, I find conversations between colors. A red speaks to a blue and both of them change and form a third color. A yellow turns from warm to cool and creates the feeling of light shifting and moving around us. Sometimes I think that these experiences of color ate the real subject of my representations. The way a color shapes light and space, the warmth of a color in light, the cooling of a color in shadow, how dramatic and expressive a color can be in recreating a memory is what currently motivates me to paint.
I know I have succeeded as a painter when the viewer is able to see a familiar place in a new and surprising way—when the traditional is transformed into something exceptional and experienced for the first time.
Like most landscape painters, I begin by working on site, encountering a particular landscape under certain conditions, sketching and making smaller paintings before beginning larger scale oils in the studio. Working in the landscape has an immense power and concreteness over my imagination. When I return to the studio, I begin the process of distilling my visual experience by working on small gouache color and compositional studies. The theatrical quality of the larger oil paintings combine both the reality of a specific place and time with the memory of a place suspended in time and detached.
My memories of an experience have at their core the character of a particular light. Perhaps most important to my recent landscapes is the fact that they were not painted on site but instead called upon my memory of a perceptual experience. Light, its presence and absence, its transformations of form and color, its character and symbolism, is one of the common threads that run through the many forms my work has taken over the years.
