Painting

My education was in limnology and my art organically grew out of my reverence of nature and my place within it. Consequently each time I learned a new art medium I took this familiar background and began with cave imagery because exploring, surveying and cave photography helped me experience the invented light, the veiled touch, the deafening silence, solitude and the olfactory of the subterranean.

My work transforms my love of nature, the mystery and caving memories into psychologically contemplative subjects including shadow figures, cloudscapes and asterisms. I paint these grisaille oil drawings on highly textured canvas, paper and panel in contemporary techniques with vintage results. Choreographed brushwork suggests impermanence and transformation, while the heavy texturing simulates the atmospheric energy that charges the work to connect with viewers on an emotional level.

Cloudscapes

Observing clouds is one of my instant and personal connections to the timeless, the infinite. And with veils of paint, I invent cloudscapes in oil grisaille where I try to suggest that sublime feeling. Their connection to water and to waves is a flowing quality of the transformative energy that these etheric forms have to not only attract, but to convert into liquid. I use this cinematic quality literally when I work, because I feel I am complete with a piece when the whole mass of energy moves, swells and flows on the paper or canvas. That flow moves me, like when I am motionless, emotionally arrested, and tearfully full of wonder at prismatic sunsets, a sky-filled spring day, or sighting an impermanent, single, small cloud on a hot August afternoon.

Asterisms 

 a group of three asterisks drawing attention to text, or a small constellation

The Illusion of Mattering

no one is your friend and no one is your enemy – everyone is your teacher