Artist’s Statement

My paintings address contemporary landscape from a primary concern with paint and its independent potential. They are large, the paint poured and dribbled onto surfaces. Specific sites or subjects serve as a starting point that alters and restructures itself as paint accumulates. Successive layers of color structure line over line until an image begins to actualize. I see the work as a process in which the paint and its flow inform the artist, demanding a series of colors and gestures that sculpt the painting. In similar fashion, the three dimensional work is the result of requisites imposed on the artist by the material and its inherent attitude. The turn of a natural branch, the grain and twists in wood can’t be ignored, suggesting alternatives that influence the final anatomy of every piece. A lot of this remains outside of the artist’s conscious control. Much of it could be termed accident, recognized and retained.

This whole process builds on the brain’s inherent nature to create figurative imagery from suggestive form and tone. Although some schools of psychiatry maintain that there is no such thing as accident, motion, rhythm and “accident” do appear to create connections between color, line and the subconscious.

In the same way, my sculptures generate themselves largely from the direction orchestrated by the natural materials themselves. The final structure is the consequence of the combined efforts by the unique form provided through nature and my attempts to “steer” them.

Seen up close the paintings might seem informed by the gesture and technique of Jackson Pollack but given some distance, they materialize, conveying a stillness and equanimity similar to William Bailey”s work. And they sometimes hint at the kind of light and atmosphere found with Russell Chatham’s paintings. There is a three dimensionality to the surface that is the outcome of extensive overlaying of the paint.

Compositionally, the paintings relate to early Dutch landscapes not unlike Gerhard Richter’s work. There is a frontality and vertical-horizontal plainness to them, complicated by form and color similar to William Bailey’s still lifes.

I see a fundamental significance to painting, as it relates with its own laws, to portraying nature. Freed from its obligation to be representational, painting landscapes seems anachronistic. Today representational painting is tolerated, if not forgive. But William Bailey’s incessant representation of bowls, bottles and vessels of all sorts doesn’t seem to be about that subject matter any more than my paintings are specifically about trees, ponds or cows. The objects or landscapes pictured become vehicles providing a means for paint to reveal itself on its own terms. The subject matter becomes more about atmosphere and mood, structured through the rhythm of paint, just as the sculpture finds calm and humor in the inherent nature and gesture of the material.