About the Artist

After having formally studied film photography in Baltimore, Maryland, I moved to Grand Rapids in 1996 where I worked as a natural and social landscape photographer for many years. In 2008, I began the transition to becoming a painter. Since then, I have kept a studio practice in Grand Rapids, exploring oil painting on canvas and wood panel, often without any initial conscious concern for pre-visualization of imagery and subject matter. My working methods are similar to spontaneous composition or improvisation, as jazz musicians sometimes call it. Beginning with bold color and energetic marks, most of my paintings emerge from a gradual building up of the surfaces and usually take several years to be completed. These paintings are my personal interior landscapes, paintings that are also a response to external environments I live in or near—the land and lakeshore I encounter in West Michigan, as well as urban/suburban Grand Rapids. Some of these works explore the growth and destruction of nature, as well as despair from human losses. I also seem to carry back to my studio some of the landscapes that I have seen and internalized from travel in North America and France.

My intention is always to resolve these paintings, while trying to identify who I am as a person in search of freedom and transcendence. After this dark and menacing year, I remain both committed and passionate about painting and, as the colors, plasticity and materials continue to change, it is the ongoing work which sustains me, that pulls me onward.

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