I work from direct observation using oil paint on panel, canvas, linen, and paper. The vast majority of the landscape paintings are done plein air, or outside on the spot, and many are premier coup, or made in one sitting. For this reason titles are usually simply the place and date of the pictures’ making.

The Catskill paintings were made while attending a residency sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at a property called Catwalk, an estate built originally by the Hudson River School painter Charles Herbert Moore. The estate sits at the foot of the Catskill mountains directly across the river and facing Olana, the property where Frederick Church built and designed a spectacular house, and where he designed and planned a landscape from which he painted views of the Hudson River and the Catskills often framed by his own landscape plan. The Olana Trust is constantly engaged in preserving and renewing this property. Many of my pictures are painted at Olana, and some are direct views that Church himself painted.

I invite you to view these pictures on your own terms: memory, technical, or purely sensual. My own thoughts about the work include the importance and fragility of nature and the moment, and the great significance of place as an artistic idea.

Nothing can be more poetic or abstract then what we actually see. I am interested in images that blur the line between the intimate and the social. While I appreciate the categories of still life and landscape for their history, I have some quarrels with them. I seek to imbue them with a new level of meaning: to ask them to contain the personal.