I am a painter of the natural world and of unconscious symbols. My paintings take shape in my imagination when I am running, riding, or sliding in the backcountry. The colors and compositions come directly from the landforms and life forms I encounter in nature.
Content dictates media in my work. Currently, I work primarily with oils. Fragments of text and collaged materials sometimes find their way into my paintings. Layering is the most consistent element in my paintings. In a process that is more intuitive than preconceived, I apply layers of paint and remove them, through etching and sanding, to expose a symbolic landscape that is usually quite different from what I imagined at the outset.
I feel a special affinity for the deer that I frequently encounter in the forest. They are hidden in many of my paintings, and they have begun to appear on the surface. The most recent of these are Lenny, an abstracted rendering of a buck that visited my yard, and Granite Point Ambush, created after I came upon a kill spot in the snow, where predators downed and completely consumed a doe in a few hours’ time.
My objective is to mediate between the natural and constructed worlds; between the unconscious and consciousness. I lay down and remove layers of paint until I feel that I have integrated the unconscious material that made itself visually available to me.
