Artist’s Statement
For me, painting is ultimately about engaging with the landscape, about creating context for my experience. In painting our environment, I am interested in arresting a moment’s perception and I have tried to build a vocabulary to explain the intricacies of my experience. Painting is to some degree a celebration of those places that survive in the wild state, at the edge; but it is also elegiac and frustrating, as we are losing so much every day.
Technique & Materials
The exacting hours at the easel are about keeping those inspired moments pure. Technique is about building a usable vocabulary that helps me explain my perceptions. Being knowledgeable in the correct applications of materials and using them in a craftsman-like manner extends my proficiency in keeping the inspired vision alive. It also helps connect me to the lineage of artists who got out of the studio and saw the significant power of Nature and tried to render their observation with really very humble and native stuff; linen, linseed oil, earth and natural pigments, wood, and hair. To draw from that is no mean feat and a constant challenge.
Influences
I have built a visual language around the painters of the 19th century American and European work that reflects similar concerns. They raised questions about the relationship of man and Nature and those questions are still valid, if not urgent, with increasing pressures from development and destruction of species and habitat.
These influences include the Barbizon, Hudson River School, Dusseldorf School of German Naturalism, and especially Ivan I. Shiskin, the premier Russian landscape artist. While I attended art school at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, I had to go my own way to be able to paint the way I intuitively sensed would serve my vision. Since the dominant mode of instruction was expressionist and non-objective in the mid 1980’s, I increasingly found I had to go outside of that academic environment to find what I needed and wanted by way of technical information and to develop my own way.
Foundations
Ultimately, I see myself as an American artist with roots that go deep in many directions. My family heritage is grounded in the southeast; one of my great-grandfathers was a cabinet maker who moved in 1842 from Germany to settle near Macon, Georgia. My grandfather took up photography very early and had his own commercial photography studio in old Cedar Key, Florida. My father and mother both worked in his studio (she hand colored portraits). They later had a photo-engraving business, so image making was part of family life. My mother’s grandfather was a blacksmith from Vermont: her father became an automobile mechanic during the transition from horse to roadster. I became more interested in drawing, fascinated by the challenge of rendering what I see, but grounded in a context of careful use of tools and materials and sensitivity to visual culture.