"Since early childhood I’ve had a deep connection to nature, spending a great deal of time outdoors. I’ve also been sketching and drawing for as long as I can remember. I painted as a young child and later in college to some extent, but it didn’t become my primary medium until the early 2000s. Apart from nature itself, the primary source of my initial inspiration was early 20th century Canadian painters Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven and their depictions of unadorned nature in places they knew intimately. I decided to take a similar approach, painting places in New England that I know very well, generally absent the direct imprint of humankind.
Many of my early paintings include rotting docks, old stone foundations, and other coastal infrastructure overgrown with seaweed and other plant life, weathered by the elements, against backdrops of sea, sky and trees, going back to nature. More recent subject matter has tended to be more wild and remote. Whereas earlier work was often based on sketches or photographs, I now usually paint from my mind’s eye, a combination of the memory of places and natural, gestural spontaneity. I often focus on the sky as much as the land and sea, on the interplay and occasionally interchangeable characteristics of the sky
and water, expressing mood, distance, the play of light, and changing colors, ultimately seeking a sense of the spirit of a place, both realistic and abstract. In smaller panel paintings (“tinyscapes”), gesture and abstraction tend to come to the fore, capturing a lot of information in a little space.
