I have always enjoyed going out into the world with my easel and interacting with the scenes I find. The first step of any painting is a pastel study on-site which tries to capture the light and the fleeting details of a particular time of day in a specific season. Spending years doing purely on-site work taught me much about how a tree looks, how the light changes through the day, how different skies belong to different seasons. Going regularly back into the world keeps my memory clear, challenges me in ways that combat complacency, and, as an excellent byproduct, pleases my dog Merlin, who generally accompanies me.
The landscapes I paint are especially relevant today with the endless sprawling of suburbia. Many people who grew up in this region have said longingly to me that my work reminds them of their families’ farms, many of which are now hermetically sealed by asphalt and buried under the latest ring road or shopping center. The scenes I paint are a celebration of parkland already set aside for public use or a documentation of our precious greenbelt that is too rapidly being devoured by sprawl. All of my paintings contain an implicit call not only to appreciate the landscape around us but to preserve it as well.
