Artist Statement
I am an American citizen who has been living in the province of Quebec for nearly thirty years. Marriage brought me here; family, work and a bit of inertia are the reasons why I stay. It’s home now.
I also stopped painting for over twenty years due to family obligations and work. I’m in catch-up mode now. It’s important that each of my paintings be as good as I can make them. That’s probably why I rework a lot of them after they are “finished”.
I guess, above all, I consider myself to be a figurative painter. To me, it’s the most challenging and the most rewarding direction for a painter to take. It requires good compositional skills, i.e., working in the abstract, and a mastery of technique in order to create a slice of the world that seems real, but one that is also imaginary.
I don’t deliberately try to make a statement or convey a message with my work either. I’m attracted to light and color, and that’s what I try to reproduce in my paintings. I want to make images that are interesting to look at, both up close and from a distance. Whatever emotion or meaning that may come through happens as a by-product, as a result that I was the one wielding the brush and mixing the colors. One of my favorite quotes by an artist that illustrates that I am by no means unique in how I regard my work, comes from Edward Hopper, who famously said: “What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house”.
Artist Background
Colorado State University
Master of Fine Arts, 1980
Gettysburg College
Bachelor of Arts, 1976