In my recent work I am inspired by medieval paintings as pathways to abstraction and visions of another world. The imperfection of these works, after hundreds of years of wear and tear, opens them up to new interpretation. Immediately there are unambiguous details that spring to life—a pointing finger, the shoulder joint of some armor—while the spatial context remains mysterious. As I spend time with the work, the image quickly becomes one that is understandable and meaningful.

In my work, nature, landscape, the bright symbolic sunrise, the gloaming, weather conditions, plant life, paint, and color become a stirred fiction. Recent paintings describe the landscape in clusters of reeds and grasses becoming chambers, channels, and shelters––tentlike formations of switch grass as architecture under big sky and distant views. I paint these images not only for what they are but for what else they are––how they build the case for emotional connection through observation, the meandering gaze, the contemplated line. These speculations depict an intimate yet runaway

Ever since art school in the sixties I have painted the figure in some form or another. Phillip Pearlstein and Alex Katz were influences there. My recent preoccupations with staging and full body movement have led to a series of paintings where dancers and dreamers interact spatially with a strange, alternate universe of beings and objects that are sometimes diaphanous and floating and sometimes tangible and solid.

We dream, we covet, we desire. These aspirations, realized or not, give us many pleasures, fantasies, and a sense of identity or style. They fuel a drive for personal fulfillment and distinction. They can be fun and exhilarating and just make us feel good.

Images of motorcycles and automobiles can be seen as representations of these desires. These images can signify speed, power, adventure, danger, prestige and sexuality. They are realities, fantasies and illusions at the same time. And they are evidence of our passion and our drives.

Zen Buddhists say words and images are inadequate to describe life and our experience of life, because they do not express the full truth. But words, images and sounds are the tools we are given and therefore we make an attempt to talk about the truth of life as best we can. It is the interaction and merger with nature reflecting the human that attracts me and creates a hybrid view of reality through my images. My paintings are an attempt to reveal the truth of my life. They act as visual journals and reflect my environmental concerns.

My images and methodologies reflect our collective, yet contradictory impulses and inclinations - indulgence, and denial, obscurity and revelation, the carnal and the cognitive. A celebration of complexity, they seek to present a world that is physically provocative, unapologetically poetic and undeniably beautiful.