Artist Statement

My paintings are remembered, invented, evoked, abstracted. They reconstruct time from inside memory, painting the moment that is already past. I move paint around until I recognize as familiar the emotion of the frame, the place, the object. I am open to the serendipity of accidents and build these into the work.

I have painted and drawn my whole adult life, but the full-time practice came later, after I retired from producing and story-editing feature documentaries. That work turned out to be closer to painting than I might have thought: both are the art of finding the form inside raw material — cutting away, shifting focus, keeping what carries meaning. I began in oil sticks and pastels, with deliberately crude forms. I now paint exclusively in oils, using brush, palette knife, and my fingers.

I work the surface, leaving a visible record of where my hand has been. The marks are gestural — I layer, scrape back, and scratch into the paint. I frequently paint over discarded pieces, so the surface reads as topography. I pay attention to creating atmospheric space, but will also place a form or line flat on the picture plane. Depending on the image, much of the painting lives at the surface. What I want is the tension between those two spaces — the eye drawn into the distance and returned to the surface: the central tension in pictorial space, and in defining the line between figuration and abstraction. These very questions came to define Modernism. I take up those questions, in my own way, on small intimate canvases. At this scale a painting is not a declaration but a confidence — something said to one person standing close.

The painters I return to are Joan Eardley, whose vigorous landscapes show me weather and attention to foreground; Turner, for atmosphere as subject; Marsden Hartley, for the bluntness of his masses; and Nicolas de Staël, for composition and distillation to the essence.

I received no formal art education but as an adult have studied for years with distinguished working artists. What can't be taught is finding one's own voice. I now walk into my studio knowing who I am. Painting remains both a discipline I have learned and a mysterious process. I am endlessly curious about where the path that is mine alone will lead. Entering the mysterious realm of painting, of things that cannot be verbalized, is where I hope my viewer will accompany me.