Nature has been my greatest teacher and has solidified my understanding of life and painting. My art practice and process is rooted in Taoist philosophical contemplative identification with nature. My paintings embody the pursuit of wu wei, effortless action. This involves becoming a vessel for the creative force by relying on intuition, feeling, and empathy, and approaching with sensitivity my being, surroundings, subject, medium, and the artwork’s surface, color, and process to achieve a visceral synthesis. Painting in this way is a form of research-based art practice that privileges the potential art making has for knowledge formation where subjective experience, cognition, and aesthetics are intertwined in the process and allows for the emergence of that which is not yet known or fully comprehended. All of this is channeled onto the canvas with an unhurried grace where the paintings themselves evoke the natural world and are reminders of the interconnectedness of all things. More than just paint on canvas, my paintings invite us to connect with the essence of nature and the human spirit, and encourage us to contemplate the world and the nature of being with a kind, and open heart.

I am often asked about the different ways I work and my seemingly different styles. I believe that an artist is affected by the materials they work with, as well as the subject matter/genre they choose. Certainly for me, it is not a matter of controlling and mastering a medium, but rather a collaboration between myself and the medium and subject/genre. By exploring different mediums, techniques, and genres, an artist’s work is strengthened because each informs the other.

Landscapes:

With landscapes, the energy of nature is felt and expressed through the painting process. So many things are going on at once - it is experienced, not analyzed. I feel that painting expressively with the thick viscous medium of oil paint, particularly with a palette knife, best suits and relates this. I also sometimes work in soft pastel when plein air painting.

My landscape paintings move from representation toward abstraction and are born from my dialogue with the natural world. Nature is rendered with simple elegance through the formal elements of line, shape, texture, and color, reminding us that beauty lies not in excess, but in the essential.

The paintings’ impasto surfaces speak to humility, a rejection of the artificial and a celebration of the raw and imperfect. Each painting becomes a textured landscape in itself, whispering stories of struggle, growth, and the ever-changing nature of life. Thick impasto accretions, like sculpted earth, rise from the canvas, rough and inviting like weathered rocks etched with tales of time and resilience and invoking compassion.

Bold colors, unburdened by the need for realism, sing with emotion, each hue a reflection of the melding between the inner and outer landscape. Amidst the vibrant chaos of nature and experience, order emerges through the foundation of minimalism. Shapes become pared down, colors are chosen with purposeful restraint. The focus shifts not to outward spectacle, but to quietude within.

In their abstraction, my landscape paintings offer a profound clarity, a reminder that true beauty lies in the simple, the humble, and the compassionate.

Nature | Life:

Art speaks to the soul and I see my process and paintings as a place to honor Nature, find balance, a place to rest, contemplate, and find peace in our increasingly frantic world. I think each viewer will experience my work in their own unique way. My hope is that my paintings become objects in their own right with a distinct presence.

Still life is contemplative, invites intimacy, and allows for exploration of fine detail. Therefore, I find materials and techniques that inherently require fine manipulation, such as egg tempera, wax tempera, and classical oil painting techniques, to best suit still life painting.

These painting techniques require a time-intensive process involving the application of many, many layers. It takes weeks and sometimes months to complete a painting. To begin, I prepare panels in a traditional manner with true gesso (rabbit skin glue and marble dust) on wood or hardboard panels. With time, paintings created with either egg or wax tempera cure to a durable mat finish that can be polished with a soft cloth. Since paintings often leave my studio before they have had time to fully cure, which often takes about a year, I coat most of my paintings with a thin beeswax-based varnish (and sometimes natural shellac first) to offer more instant protection. My paintings created using traditional oil techniques require drying time before being varnished.