Artist Statement
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh, from The Miracle of Mindfulness
In my paintings, I explore the boundaries between realism and abstraction in images of the natural world. From afar, my work appears realistic, sometimes photographic, but close up there is an awareness of paint, gesture and process. I build up a complex layered surface in oil paint, hoping to convey the essence of the subject rather than describing it literally. I zoom in and crop sections of an image, removing it from its context, focusing on pattern, composition and light.
Most recently, my paintings have been focused on various bodies of water and on small patches of diverse plant life. Water is endlessly interesting, mostly because of its nature to distort and refract light. The unexpected shapes and colors that result can challenge how we think something will look, again blurring the line between the realistic and the abstract. As for the plants, I've become increasingly dismayed by the unhealthy gardening and lawncare practices that poison such plants and feed the toxic runoff into our watershed. My paintings call attention to the overlooked beauty of the targets of herbicides and pollutants and are studies of these interrelated ecosystems.