Artist Statement
I am a landscape painter working in a variety of media: watercolor, oils, monoprints, woodcuts and linocuts. My works follows a long tradition of modern landscape painting that puts emphasis on expression. This requires interpretation rather than simply reproducing external reality.
Most of my work is done on-site, directly from nature. I prefer working this way because through the process of painting I make an intuitive connection with my surroundings and express an inner experience of reality. This means penetrating beneath external appearances to make a statement using the elements of painting—color, shape, line, etc.—representational of landscape, which, in turn, expresses my feelings and emotions about a specific time and place.
I have often used the diptych and triptych format to explore different aspects of a place and to suggest change and the passage of time, as opposed to a static, monolithic view. Nature is dynamic, and I want to express this as well as my relationship to it. My work lacks evidence of man. I depict only my response to or an aspect of nature’s presence in painterly terms.
Art, like dreams, has the capacity to bring unconscious content to consciousness. As this surfaces, art helps us find new physical images to collectively see, articulate, and integrate what has previously been denied or unimagined. In this way, we experience the world and ourselves more intimately,
My work is as much a statement about what we have not wanted to see as what we do want to see—the destruction of the environment or the beauty and splendor of nature. It is my intention to present a positive vision that requires seeing ourselves as part of a larger whole.
Sculpture Statement
My sculpture explores how I envision forms taking possession of space – how they will occupy it and have a presence.
These forms are the result of drawings that come from my imagination. I seek figural poses that can be translated into masses and voids, which abstractly represent human conditions. Nature is my primary inspiration. The drawing is an intuitive idea of what I want to do.
The process of making the sculpture, the products of my imagination, guide the outcome, and tell me when the sculpture “works.” This is something felt rather than known.
The medium of all my sculpture is wood. There are many reasons for this: the affordability and availability of the material; a personal affinity with the quality of wood; and the reductive method of direct carving.
I like the challenge of finding a 3-D form that complements the tree’s organic qualities. Working in wood requires planning how the grain will split when it dries.
When I remove the excess wood from the tree trunk, its character completely transforms. At that point, I feel I am on my way to finding the final sculptural form and resolving the piece.
Reductive Woodcut Technique
My works are done in a reductive woodcut method of relief printing in multiple colors. A system of registration (exact placement of the paper on the block) is crucial, because this method requires reprinting on top of what has already been printed. Generally, you work from lighter to darker colors and begin by printing a solid color. The block is cut away wherever that color is to remain. Then another color is printed. Again, areas or lines where those colors are to remain are cut away. Then another color is printed and so forth until the desired image is achieved.
This printing technique is a traditional Japanese method, which uses ink made of water-based pigment with rice paste as a binding medium. The ink is applied with a “maru bake,” a round-cornered brush and the printing is done using a “baren,” a lightweight hand-held bamboo disk. For the printing process to work well, the paper must be kept a consistent degree of moistness. This method is very labor intense but the results are most rewarding, for this way of working is painterly in the sense that it is a process of actions which accumulate into an image. It is working without a net. There are no mistakes. It is similar to watercolor painting, with which I have been involved for the past thirty years. Therefore, the reductive woodcuts are an extension and interpretation of the watercolor experience.