STATEMENT
IN MY PAINTING I SEEK TO PORTRAY

THE BEAUTY AND LIGHT I EXPERIENCE IN NATURE.

 I WANT TO CONVEY THE FEELING OF BEING THERE.
For me, the spectrum of painting in the objective genres flourishes between two poles. At one end is the seamless realism which has its roots in Renaissance portraiture and today is highly informed by photography. The other end is an expressive kind of painting which sprang up in the nineteenth century—exemplified by the French Impressionists. I have an affection for the latter, but I am enchanted by great painting of all types.

My first inspirations as a child were the vivid, painterly book illustrations of N. C. Wyeth. Some of the large original canvases fill a room at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania—a true shrine of American art.

Now I particularly admire the previous turn-of-the-century artists Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, and many of the American Impressionists. They painted the light. Sargent and Sorolla were masters of gesture in their brushwork, and their art still sets a standard for portrait and figure painting.

Outdoors I seek those vantage points where the light conveys a spiritual connection or energy. However, out in the landscape or in front of a model, the details of local color and form absorb me, and I lean in the direction of a realist style—the attempt to paint exactly what I see. Yet I'm increasingly drawn to the more transitory effects of light and sea and sky—uniquely special moments to which one cannot return day after day, which must ultimately be realized in the studio.

Looking at realist paintings, I tend to focus on the artists' technical feats. Looking at painters like Monet, on the other hand, involves the imagination as well as the eyes. Pictorial reality is a bit out of focus, because the artist is focusing on something beyond it. In his late water lily paintings, one literally swims in pure energy as the world of form dissolves.

So my work weaves a course between these two styles, always painting form but always prospecting for light, striving to see a deeper harmony—to open the door to that pure energy.