I am driven with a passion for visually expressing what is happening in and around my life, finding the significance within the commonplace. Painting with simple elegance and warmth, my intent is to create works of art that express the beauty, the eternal within daily scenes. I strive to expand the viewer's vision, their awareness and their experience of the magic within life. Viewers find themselves intrigued and enchanted. They are taken on an artistic journey within the world I have created.

Whether a landscape, still life or portrait-like image, in action or contemplation, the narrative is always in my art. Starting with just one idea, the painting begins to take over. A dialog begins with the characters and spaces they occupy with a general agreement between all as to what will happen next. The figures in my paintings and the negatives that surround them arrange themselves.

Although my subject matter primarily centers around natural forms, I transcend the ordinary by interpreting these elements through rich and varied media, including: oil, watercolor, acrylic, colored pencil, clay and wood. The introduction to oil bar has been a major influence on me and my work. The possibilities of using oil bars in a dense and highly controlled fashion immediately fascinated me. It allows an even more intimate feeling in the creative process to be translated into my paintings.

Today, I am interested in how spots of color advance and recede to produce tension and life, conveying how body, mind and spirit all interact with each other to produce joy, harmony, light and energy. The rhythm of lights and darks with a melody line that informs, completes another painting, another story.

My art reflects a number of influences: life, metaphysics, and these artists:

&<61623; Cézanne's simplified forms attempted to develop an ideal synthesis of naturalistic representation, personal expression, and abstract pictorial order.

&<61623; Hawthorne showed me how light shapes objects and to think in terms that everything, before it is anything, exists as spots of color.

&<61623; Klee's "art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible" concept is one of the underlying forces that shape my work.

&<61623; Matisse’s when it came to conveying meaning that arrangement of color is as important as a painting's subject matter.


...