Artist Statement
Out among the trees exists a language without words where, when the mind is quiet, one observes the fullness of being, the fullness of the manifest world. This simple state has its ecstatic qualities. I am interested in this state, in the nature of consciousness and relations between the physical and the metaphysical. Thus I am interested in using painting as a means to examine how we see and where we locate the ‘self’ in seeing. It seems that the visual experience resonates intimately with our emotional and subjective experience of the world.
The recent paintings are based in the landscape--specifically, the dense and lyrical woods of Michigan. In addition to the influences of other painters and visual artists, several writers have had a significant and lasting influence on my work. A lifelong literary influence is the work of writer Jim Harrison. Harrison's influence on my work is based on landscape as the nexus of the relation of the inner life to the outer, or the spiritual to the material. Some of the paintings use locations in the writing of Harrison as a departure point. For the past few years I have traveled around to places Harrison lived, or to places he wrote about, taking pictures and sometimes making drawings. The paintings grow out of those visual notes.