I'm from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a small town on the shore of Lake Michigan. My earliest memories are of lake weather animating 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 like to keep moving from one way of painting to the next, restless and challenged; I think of it as a migration. 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, animating conditions. In this sense maybe my abstracts are a kind of weather. The space my paintings are 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 may start as a thought, then it goes in its own direction.
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 like to keep moving from one way of painting to the next, restless and challenged; I think of it as a migration. 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, animating conditions. In this sense maybe my abstracts are a kind of weather. The space my paintings are 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 may start as a thought, then it goes in its own direction.
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.
