traditional oil

digital

Artist statements perplex me. It’s difficult to identify an ulterior motive when all you’re doing is plopping your easel down in front of a particularly pleasing copse of trees and painting what you see. But painting is the excuse I use to look around. To stop seeing the world as something I have to navigate through in order to get errands done, and look at it as it is. To just be in it.

Our world is loud. Loud and urgent and uncertain, saturated with bright, flashing, invasive things constantly fighting for our attention and funneling us toward the next goal, the next quota, the next task, and on and on. And so what I value most — what I look for everywhere I go — is the small, unassuming beauty drowned out in the chaos. The interplay of light and shadow on a muddy puddle in the driveway. The metaphor presented by a dandelion growing where it shouldn’t be able to. The stunning, luminous green of a leaf lit from behind.

I paint these things to remember that all I am here to do is be alive. The rest is extra.