The world is hard, bright, literal, fast, equally devastating, beautiful, and exciting. I want to compliment that. Balance it. Evoke a sense of nostalgia in an unconventional way, create a puzzle in your mind- you don’t know what it reminds you of or if it just reminds you of a feeling- but it’s not literal because you have never seen these places before. There is minimal specific detail to give away the riddle. Just take a pause- a breath away from the hard lines and loud noise constantly hitting us.

I approach each painting with only a loose sense of a place or experience and a vision of where light will reflect. The rest transcends through fine layers and compositional rearrangements. What excites me with this series is the rebellion of it. I am going against my traditional training and my past hyper realistic work. I have no image to refer to, my compositions change constantly until the paint is just about dry. It is time sensitive and easy to lose it when you go too far. You must know when to stop but also be willing to squeeze in a new element, risking the entire piece as you do it. The result is never as expected and the knowledge that it cannot be recreated in its exactness is so special. After years of realism, this is finally a process that pushes me, scares me, excites me, and fulfills me.

With my heavily varnished pieces, I admire the subtle surface imperfections the most. It reminds me of the top of a lake when you’ve canoed to the center first thing in the morning, before anything has broken the still water but there are small ripples from the movement below, and tiny insects sprinkle the pristine glassy surface. The drips that form on the varnish edges feel inspired by the rain pouring on a rooftop made of glass. The intersectionality of the disturbed glassy surface with the foggy distant image below it, culminates my desire to give the viewer a peaceful moment of reflection and contemplation- about what the image feels like, sounds like, and where it transcends them.

By blurring or “fogging” my paintings, I am forcing the viewer to perceive the scene in its entirety. By eliminating tight detail, the eye is not distracted by ‘this or that'. The viewer can perceive the scene as a moment. My hope is that such ambiguity enables each viewer to connect with the scene in their own way and pull from a personal memory- a place, a feeling, or a time.

Through automatic painting, I can pull from my experiences living in Wyoming, Vermont, Maryland, and Colorado, as well as my travels in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, and the Adirondack Mountains.