Artist Statement
I find a compelling attraction to the dynamic of a truck in the landscape. It’s not nostalgia, it’s about capturing the truckness of a truck, and distilling the relationship of truck to landscape - the truck is landscape.
My painting is a personal inquiry, I want to capture the portrait, the snapshot of my subject so that it feels alive. Whether it’s the head of a person or a rooftop landscape, I want my paint to touch something specific, something that will resonate as essential and real.
The paintings in this exhibit are one-offs – unconstrained problem solving completed in one-session. Whether landscapes or portraits, they share a common format in their immediacy, focus, and scale. I like painting these things and see them as spontaneous depictions of subjects with intimate narratives driven by universal dispositions.
That may be a tall order. As an American painter I deny any labeling attached to my work. Paradoxically, I often embrace the use of tropes to frame my process – I want it both ways. There is an innate stubbornness in our national psyche that resists static-identity characterizations. Perhaps America is too big of a country to put under one roof.
As a painter and art educator, I believe that creating and experiencing art is crucial to developing and sustaining humanity. As a studio painter I am dedicated to the inner voice and in pursuit of the elusive zone: that perfect, elemental moment when one is with the flow and achieves self-actualization.
As an art educator my objective remains the human core, but the goal is now extrinsic: to teach and train individuals with diverse backgrounds and abilities to tap into their strengths, challenge their fears, and learn to see for themselves.
These are noble pursuits.