Landscape is where my work begins, but rarely where I expect it to end.
I am drawn to the structure beneath a landscape... the division between land and sky, the weight of a distant form, the interruption of a line, and the way color and atmosphere can change our perception of a place. I begin with what I see, but I'm less interested in describing a particular landscape than in discovering what can be taken from it, rearranged, simplified and pushed toward abstraction.
The places I have lived have inevitably shaped that way of seeing. The dense landscape of Louisiana, the expansive skies of Texas and the High Plains, and the forests, water and changing weather of New England have each left their mark. I'm interested in the differences between these places, but also in the visual language they share... horizon, distance, shape, rhythm, light and atmosphere.
My background in graphic design is always present in the work. Decades spent thinking about composition, hierarchy, negative space, color and visual relationships have become instinctive. When I paint, those instincts remain, but the certainty of design gives way to something less predictable. Paint can resist. A mark can redirect the entire painting. An accident can become more interesting than the original intention.
Photography plays a different role. It takes me back into the landscape and reminds me to look. Sometimes photographs provide source material for paintings, but their greater value is the act of making them... slowing down, paying attention to weather and light, noticing relationships and discovering compositions that might otherwise disappear unnoticed.
I am increasingly interested in how far a painting can move away from the landscape that began it while retaining some memory of place. I want the work to exist somewhere between observation and abstraction... recognizable enough to suggest landscape, but open enough to become something else.
And I want to leave room for surprise.
The paintings I'm most interested in making are not necessarily the ones I can already imagine. I want experimentation, uncertainty and discovery to remain part of the process... allowing the work to take me somewhere I haven't been before.