I explore what I term ‘storyscapes.’ Beyond landscape, I see these paintings as the deeper stories of our natural and urban worlds. I reach for nuances of light and movement in my paintings. The process of careful observation and attention to my own internal responses to what is happening on the paper or canvas allows that which is perhaps unseen in our everyday world to emerge in the act of painting.
I paint with gouache or acrylic, depending on the trajectory of the painting, sometimes mixing mediums.
I first began using gouache for plein air painting due to its portability, intense opaque colors, and for its more environmentally-conscious footprint. Gouache allows me to work quick sketches under rapidly changing light conditions and to capture the immediate experience and mood of place. Both gouache and acrylic offer a wonderful range of possible textures, opacities and surface vocabulary.
I work from plein air sketches, from my own photographs reworked in Photoshop, and from memory, dreams and imagination.