Artist's Statement

I specialize in painting the Midwestern landscape in both oil and watercolor. My training in landscape architecture helps me to see a human presence — cultural, physical, and philosophical — that resides in the physical forms of the landscape, forms that are shaped as much by ideas as by the hands of humans. I try to bring to my paintings an understanding that the landscape is not just a framed view, but something alive and evolving.

I paint realistically because I believe that art should be accessible. The world contains a visual vocabulary of physical forms that are meaningful precisely because they are part of our shared human experience.

The beauty of the world often lies concealed behind a veil of familiarity, a veil of the everyday that conceals the sublime nature of the world embedded in every rock and tree. The Midwest, with its subtlety of color and beauty, its rich agricultural bounty, and its sweeping plains, contains a series of commonly experienced Midwestern landscape icons: rivers, lakes, fields and dunes, farms and forests. I try to reveal what is sacred and humane in all these things.

I am heavily influenced by artists during the period 1890–1914 — the Scandinavian Symbolists, the Viennese Secession, and the American painter, George Inness, in particular.