Landscape
In my landscape painting practice, I depend on site specificity grounded in the understanding that places are knowable only through direct immersion. It is thus important to me to paint plein air throughout the year, supplemented with studio work as a method of translation and reflection.
My painting locations are meaningful destinations. Seeking a deeper understanding of their ecology, culture, and history, I conduct extensive research, including the study of topographical, historical, contemporary, and art-trail maps. My aim is to follow in the footsteps and spirit of nineteenth-century American artists, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Albert Bierstadt, artist-environmentalists who were advocates for landscape preservation. In the manner of their nomadic trailblazing, my methods of transportation are integral to my process. Locally, my painting excursions originate from my home in the Bronx, where I reach my sites on foot, by bicycle, or via public transportation, carrying my supplies as portable luggage. In Red Hook, Williamsburg, Sunset Park, and Coney Island, I am drawn to the intermingling of historical resonance and environmental degradation—testaments to human impact and, often disrespect.
Farther afield, my travels become sojourns rather than excursions. Vehicles—cars or trucks—transform into mobile studios and campsites. Waking and sleeping amid the mists of the Hudson Valley and the White Mountains, I seek to capture the spiritual feeling Cole described when he wrote, “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet.” Having grown up in Oregon and Nevada, the West is part of me. On trips to many places including the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, the Eastern Sierra, Wyoming, Mono Basin, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Nevada, and Lake Tahoe, I travel alone in the tradition of John Muir, following cairns and trail markers, always conscious of how the land’s monumentality dwarfs human presence. Another painting-sojourn consisted of a series of day trips I took in June–July 2016 to the Dolomites while teaching in Pratt’s Venice program. Hiking to remote sites, I often encountered sudden thunderstorms on otherwise hot summer days. I accompany my painting travels with field notes, merging my practice with exploration.
In a small series of monumental cityscapes —scenes of Venice, Bronx rooftops, and Brooklyn, I explore the nineteenth-century idea of painting as spectacle for its process aspects. Working on surfaces that stay open longer becomes an engagement with the physicality of paint and the greater role of abstraction that emerges.
Despite careful planning, I view each landscape experience as serendipitous, as if discovered by chance. I seek a visual dynamic of light and form. My outdoor paintings often develop quickly, as if breathed onto their surfaces. It is bringing them into the existence they already contain that guides the studio phase of my work. As my focus on landscape has intensified, I am increasingly aware of the anthropogenic forces accelerating harm to the natural world in the twenty-first century. Natural habitats and resources are rapidly disappearing. Grounding my work in observation, I strive to celebrate the beauty and fragility of what remains.
Still Life
An act of transformation of the real into a new version of itself, still life has long been a passion for me. Building surfaces with alla prima layers, I gradually and obsessively record the materials, textures, colors, and graphic qualities of objects and the light and space in which they exist. Art cannot rival the perfection of objects themselves—natural or human made. My goal is to reflect their beauty through painting, in the vanitas tradition of the transitory. My reductive compositions are meant to coexist autonomously within a larger actual environment.