Artist’s Statement
The content of my paintings lies beyond the visible features of gardens set in the natural world. I am interested in portraying the interactions of formal design with the wildness outside the garden, and of temporary perfection with the approaching destruction of nature at its most dangerous. The maze is the most intentional human design within a garden, and fire is nature’s most extreme threat to that. At the same time, fire represents a cleansing, sweeping away of the past and a chance for the natural world to regenerate and reclaim its own power over human intention.
I paint in acrylic on linen and use realism to make the possible more believable. The act of painting unites me with a world that I recognize within myself. When I am not painting, I feel disoriented, not knowing where I really am. Putting paint onto the canvas is where I find my bearings, at the intersection of the image and the brush. A glimpse of landscape becomes a structure on which to put paint, and that place becomes submerged in the process of painting. Place and paint merge in a synthesis that is something new, from which a painting emerges and the place itself floats away into the wilderness.