A Little History

I’ve always been drawn to the modern schools of painting, attracted by simplification of form and color, as well as expression of movement. I did not begin my career in landscape and as a young painter I had been more focused on teaching myself the language of visual art, employing various styles and techniques in an almost academic manner. At that point my subjects tended more to the abstract and figurative, but as I travelled and compiled more life experience of my own I began to contemplate my place in the world, and more specifically, the land surrounding me. 

The high desert of New Mexico was a catalyst. Coming from my native New England, the southwest was a visual shock. Nowhere else had I witnessed reminders of human existence within such a humbling vastness of space. The contours of the land, the wind in the trees and clouds, the dusty roads all converged in rural New Mexico to embody a unique and pastoral solitude. The passage of time didn’t have the same hold out there and what was originally intended as a few months stay became my home and my subject for eighteen years. 

Now, with my recent return to the east coast, I enter a landscape that is nostalgic of my past yet almost completely untouched by me as a subject. This is a period of trial and error and I am eager for the challenges it brings. Some pieces still evoke the approach I took in New Mexico though it has been my intent to break away from some of this aesthetic so as to treat my new environment with a fresh eye. I am struck by the sheer saturation of water and I often strive to interpret this all-pervasive element in my landscapes.  More and more I find myself replacing hard, opaque line with transparent washes in order to express a world diffuse in its humidity, lush with vegetation bleeding into every open corner. As different as this may be from my old terrain, I've found that many of the themes I carried East with me still apply. Farms, fields, barns and fence lines are the common ground of rural America, be it northern New Mexico or the eastern shore of Maryland. In this I am reminded that there is an internal landscape that travels with me, a filter through which I not only chronicle my own passage, but also communicate and share a sense of place and belonging that is universal to us all.