Artist Statement
The Expansive Moment
I have been painting the urban environment in an abstract manner for many years. Early on I painted empty sidewalks and parking lots, transforming the mundane urban landscape with diffuse atmosphere and exaggerated color. In 2009, I began utilizing Internet traffic information as the basis for increasingly abstracted images. What interested me most were the undifferentiated stretches of the urban Midwest with its mercurial winter weather. In those pieces, the long empty vistas and changing light evoke a degree of wistful contemplation. Recently a move to a new studio put highways, changing weather conditions and long vistas directly outside my window. I could experience first hand what I’d been viewing on line. The emotional impact of my deserted panoramas is more important to me than accurate representation. I am influenced by 19th century American landscape painting and by the Buddhist concept of groundlessness. The tension between abstraction and illusionism in my work generates something familiar and yet unknown, of this world and yet also otherworldly. As a nature lover and bird watcher I feel helpless and hopeless reading news stories about climate change and its terrible repercussions. I take solace in my studio practice and in observing an expansive view.
I have been painting the urban environment in an abstract manner for many years. Early on I painted empty sidewalks and parking lots, transforming the mundane urban landscape with diffuse atmosphere and exaggerated color. In 2009, I began utilizing Internet traffic information as the basis for increasingly abstracted images. What interested me most were the undifferentiated stretches of the urban Midwest with its mercurial winter weather. In those pieces, the long empty vistas and changing light evoke a degree of wistful contemplation. Recently a move to a new studio put highways, changing weather conditions and long vistas directly outside my window. I could experience first hand what I’d been viewing on line. The emotional impact of my deserted panoramas is more important to me than accurate representation. I am influenced by 19th century American landscape painting and by the Buddhist concept of groundlessness. The tension between abstraction and illusionism in my work generates something familiar and yet unknown, of this world and yet also otherworldly. As a nature lover and bird watcher I feel helpless and hopeless reading news stories about climate change and its terrible repercussions. I take solace in my studio practice and in observing an expansive view.