My many years of design-related activity have had a strong impact on my work as a painter. Accordingly, I'm always looking for ways to distill the formal compositional elements of a painting necessary to express a central concept.
My most fundamental influence has been ancient Chinese painting — its depiction of time and space, expression of duality, and its marvelous iconography of human and nature. I'm indebted to early modernists of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Cezanne, Bonnard, Mondrian, Morandi, and Matisse, to name a few. Later American influences from mid to late 20th century include Milton Avery, Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn. Current artists who inspire me include Sean Scully, Gerhard Richter, and Chuck Close.
In my current body of work, I not only continue my formal study of space, form, and color within the classical genre of landscape, but am also moving into new territory as I continue to distill and interpret the world I inhabit in new ways.
Collectors who know my older work will hopefully find my current work both familiar and new: familiar in terms of the textural quality of the surface, treatment of edges, strong horizontals, and luminosity. And new as the familiar forms of the barn, for example, are fractured in new ways and sometimes disappear altogether when I move into the nonrepresentational realm.
