For me, painting is abstract. The idea itself is abstract. I make paintings that can be easily named; that is, the viewer knows what the content is. I am interested in showing the structures and forms (abstractions) within those parts of nature that I am continually drawn to. These oil paintings--my first after a twenty-five year hiatus--are fleshed out versions of earlier concerns. Continuity is not only important to me, it is unavoidable. The agitated frenzy of nature itself barely hides the violence and hope. Though contradictory, both are also very attractive.

As a painter of easily identified subject matter, my goals are clearly different than they were to the nineteenth century artists or even to those for most of the last century, who made landscape paintings. We see differently now, if for no other reason that we are, on a daily basis, inundated with uncounted images which are trapped in little rectangles, frozen in time, severely edited, and for the most part, uninteresting. The painter has something that other image-makers do not have, and that is chance, or the unexpected accident or gesture.