Artist’s Statement
The ongoing energy of life in a wild place, existing outside my experience, is fascinating to me. In wilderness I can just begin to perceive the complicated relationships in these mysterious communities, a message flowing through this hidden world and then flowing through my brush onto my canvas. A painting can be a cosmos, a microcosm with its own spirit, able to draw the imagination of the viewer into a new place, to feel its force and independence.
For me the magic of the landscape is that it is actually a parallel world to that of humankind and its culture. A world that emphasizes busyness and production, meant to fill all the quiet open spaces in our minds can be numbing, exhausting. What I depend on is the separateness of wilderness. I am delighted when I find a place that is perfect in its wholeness, clearly a world apart, that requires nothing of me, and that offers me nothing but a vision of its self-sufficiency. I don’t want to be merely in a place that exists outside and beyond me, I want to become that place.
