Painting has always been a means of story-telling about my life, dreams and visions, plus my observations of the world. I process things visually. My natural inclination to allegorical, narrative work has continued to deepen over time. I play with mixed realities, which has developed into a gritty magical realism in much of my work. I think of art as thought made visual. The sensual act of painting is one of balancing truly being able to see with giving form to that which is unseen.
Over the years my earlier imaginary landscapes, many of which have served as backdrops to other subject matter, have given way to my fourth serious body of work. This has been the most difficult thing to do – attempting to portray landscapes as narrative. Based on my own travel photography, much of it taken from passenger trains, these landscapes are becoming expressive of something deeper going on below the surface, often evolving into metaphor and allegory.
The topic of this website – mind, memory, dementia – hits home hard at this time. In the spring of 2012, I took a cross-country train trip to help my mother move into the final stages of her life, into a memory unit at an assisted living center. I wrote about it here: The Beginning Stages of Goodbye. Much of the artwork shared on this website reflects those travels, both literally and figuratively, as well as the physical, mental and emotional journey that we are still on.
