I'm from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. Early memories are of lake weather enlivening the world with sound, shifting lights and darks of sky, water, grass. I am lucky my early childhood was filled with solitude, unusual freedom to explore the woods and the water's edge, and to make things out of what I found.
I started to paint steadily, in earnest, in Brooklyn, in 2006. I keep moving from one way of painting to the next, restless and challenged; I think of it as a migration, I'm working a
canvas like a field until something starts to grow.
Most of my work is abstract because it usually has no subject other than its own making: materials dissolve and reunite, becoming topographies of paint. I like disturbing the surface of the paint, scraping, starting again responding to changing conditions. In this sense maybe my abstracts are a kind of weather. The space my paintings is committed to is an atmosphere of movement- recession and advancement, fluctuating density and tranparency sometimes broken by light, often there is an afterimage. The painting starts as the intention to act,to practice painting, then see where it goes.
I am inspired by the work of fellow painters looking for illumination in the dark: Rothko of course, Jake Berthot, Rebecca Purdum- and the venerables: Turner, Inness, Ryder. Poets too: Wallace Stevens, Rilke.
I started to paint steadily, in earnest, in Brooklyn, in 2006. I keep moving from one way of painting to the next, restless and challenged; I think of it as a migration, I'm working a
canvas like a field until something starts to grow.
Most of my work is abstract because it usually has no subject other than its own making: materials dissolve and reunite, becoming topographies of paint. I like disturbing the surface of the paint, scraping, starting again responding to changing conditions. In this sense maybe my abstracts are a kind of weather. The space my paintings is committed to is an atmosphere of movement- recession and advancement, fluctuating density and tranparency sometimes broken by light, often there is an afterimage. The painting starts as the intention to act,to practice painting, then see where it goes.
I am inspired by the work of fellow painters looking for illumination in the dark: Rothko of course, Jake Berthot, Rebecca Purdum- and the venerables: Turner, Inness, Ryder. Poets too: Wallace Stevens, Rilke.
