Carmel, IN
This body of work emerges from a sustained studio practice centered on translating the experience of nature into an abstract visual language. Rather than referencing landscape as a subject, the work investigates how movement, atmosphere, and seasonal change register in memory. It is informed by living for over two decades in a region where dramatic shifts in light, color, and weather continually reshape the environment, creating an ongoing dialogue between permanence and transition.
The paintings are constructed through a physical, layered process using oil paint combined with cold wax and artist petroleum on thick cotton canvas or wood panel. Layers are built and disrupted through scraping, palette knife work, and gestural mark-making, allowing forms to surface and recede. This push and pull between structure and intuition is essential to the work; moments of control give way to chance, creating surfaces that hold both tension and openness.
Academic training provides a foundation in composition, balance, and spatial organization, while references to Old Master painting techniques coexist with contemporary abstraction. Soft, atmospheric passages are set against more defined gestures, echoing the contrast between stillness and motion found in nature. The work resists literal depiction in favor of distillation—what remains after the experience has passed. While some works lean toward more recognizable botanical or organic forms, others move further into abstraction, allowing structure, gesture, and atmosphere to carry the image. This range reflects an intentional exploration rather than a shift in direction, with each painting occupying a different point along the same visual continuum.
In Nature 1, layered fields of color suggest air and movement, while organic forms—floral, vegetal, or aqueous—appear embedded within the surface. The painting occupies a threshold state, neither fully resolved nor static, reflecting the transient nature of the landscape that inspires it.
This practice is driven by a desire to create work with presence—paintings that hold emotional weight and visual density without reliance on repetition or reproduction. Each piece exists as a singular object, carrying its own internal logic and rhythm. Through abstraction, the work invites sustained looking and offers a space where viewers can reconnect with their own embodied memory of nature.
