When I paint in an abstract style I am responding to the moment and inquiring into the here and now. Feelings are stirred, memories evoked imagination comes out to play. In my landscapes it’s not so much that I am painting nature but more that I am painting my experience of it. Sometimes I am painting inner landscapes because often our inner lives are reflected in the art. Sometimes I seek to capture the simplicity and sometimes the complexity of life in a painting. These landscapes are both serene and energizing, and sometimes dark and desolate but always revealing a ray of light. The dark paintings I hope allow us to see through the darkness to the light in our lives.

These portraits are inspired by the post-impressionist and expressionist painters of Europe, early to mid twentieth century (like Egon Schiele, Käthe Kollwitz, and Paula Modersohn-Becker, who turned away from romanticized ideals to paint life as it is: raw, emotional, and human) and the Bay Area Figurative Movement including painters like Joan Brown and Richard Diebenkorn, who combined bold abstraction with figuration to explore inner life and personal truth. Like them, I’m drawn to paint both real and imaginary, revealing the raw and the real aspects of the human condition through unrefined brushstrokes and expressive markmaking.