The landscape as painting subject suits my sensibility as an artist. There is something vital in the landscape motif that makes me want to capture and keep the experience of being in nature. Lately, I’ve gone from a realistic, close inspection and rendering of what is before me toward abstraction, which requires the same intensity of inspection but concentrates on breaking down nature to its essential form, color and brush or palette knife stroke on a two dimensional surface. My deep and abiding interest in the basic “stuff” of visual creation, the design and compositional considerations an artist makes in developing an image and the tools available for one to use in crafting a work lead me on this path to making beautiful art. In a certain sense the endearment of form makes the form lasting.

This also holds true with my collage work. I like building pictures from found and repurposed paper, photographs and other assorted scraps torn or retrieved from discarded work. These are combined with paint, pencil, chalk or other drawing media in new and often surprising ways. These collages come about by both accident and calculation, often starting with the germ of an idea or response to the material before me or even a brief sketch. I begin layering on a surface with paper, paint, or graphic tool from initial impulse or sketch and subsequent choices of form, color and mark follows after in response to what has been laid down before. The way my collage elements are put together can suggest land forms, geographic or geological strata or traces in the development of a map and as such, involves a search in discovering clues to a seemingly random order – some connection between things. I’ve read that collage seems to satisfy and reflect some deep and fundamental human instinct. Collage lets form serve as emblems or points of departure toward finding the clues or meaning in my work.