“My work is always in some way autobiographical.  My landscapes explore my relationship to place and time.  Some of the places I’ve recorded are ingrained in me, places I’ve gone to since I was a child. So, if I return to a place and it has drastically changed, I feel alarmed, violated.  Maybe this is why I record places that I sense may not be the same when I return. With climate change and the current state of the world my feelings about my recordings have shifted towards an anxious necessity to paint, to grasp the beauty in a fleeting season, day, moment, life.   

The last few years I decided to escape to the woods in my studio. I went big in scale and obsessively looked at the minute details of nature (the earth, leaves, roots I was deeply missing). I’ve been working from photographs I took leaning hard on my memory for feeling and my muscle memory from painting from life.  

During my upstate residency at Fieldstones, I did all plein air painting.  The immediacy of this looking and thinking practice influenced the large works in progress in my studio and continues to do so.  I can see a change in the work in painting speed, movement, feeling and color. No matter how much studio work I do from photo, large scale, condensing the space whatever I’m up to, I can’t do that work and use my painter’s brain over the lure of a photo without exercising my minds’ eye out in the field with painting from life. Excursions in the field make the work fresh and bring me back to why I make the work. Answering the question for myself of why I would paint a landscape at all.”