Artist Statement
I have been a painter of the observed landscape for over two decades now, painting in oil on board or canvas, usually on a horizontal format, and often as diptychs or triptychs. I have a love of the paint, and my medium is invariably applied vigorously, with thick and energetic impasto marks. I came into my practice initially as a plein-air landscape painter, making small works not wholly beholden to but derived from what was seen on location, and in reaction to a myriad of external (and perhaps internal) circumstances. Despite their modest scale and in deference to the subject, I strive to make even my small canvases possess an inherent monumentality. I have recently moved that same process into the studio to produce larger and more contemplated works, with the sky-scape becoming increasingly predominant to the almost subservient land in my paintings. I continue to be interested in exploring the dichotomy between the social constructs of painting and humanity’s understanding of nature. The importance of thick, impasto paint in the manifestation of the energetic mark has endured. Increasingly, as I experiment with a tension between realism and abstraction, I have abandoned the conventional horizontal landscape format in favor of the iconic square, with even the distinct horizon-line fading, as I attempt to create paintings with greater atmospheric ambiguity, and about the intrinsic impermanence of nature and the sublime.