Although I’ve been involved in my practice as a painter for some thirty- odd years, I’ve never been completely successful in determining just what got me started and further, just what it is that I’m up to.

At some level my work is a response to the mystery of being here (wherever ‘here’ is) and  in the beginning, I worked in what would be called a ‘high realist’ style. My interest was primarily to document and to perhaps reveal the essential limitedness of our knowledge by constructing ‘real’’ and banal scenes or contexts in a very cool and detached manner. Although quite natural and possible, the resulting images were meant to be difficult to ‘read’ and this  difficulty would point up the ambiguous nature of reality.  I worked much as a magician would work at practicing a magic trick or illusion. I was careful to hide the means used to create the final work…to achieve a smoothness of surface and an objectivity  which was not to be ‘contaminated’ by any ‘painterly’ trace of the medium or the artist’s subjective feelings.

At some point, I switched from acrylics to oil and began to paint “en plaine aire” landscapes where I became more involved with the plastic possibilities of the medium itself. The more I worked with this more expressionistic approach, the more I became enamored of the medium and soon I was having difficulty distinguishing just where paint ended and image began. The next step became inevitable; I suppose…working only with the expressive qualities of paint itself and leaving ‘recognizable image’ behind. I have yielded much conscious or direct control in my present practice and as a result am more open to what is disclosed or revealed to me through the process of working.  

So now, in a time where we all seem to be involved in relentless and near-hysterical “doing” I think of my artistic practice in terms of Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world” and the resulting works as, to quote Mark Kingwell, “slabs of existence”. These slabs are not pieces of equipment subordinate to the concept of “usefulness” but are instead openings or spaces in which we are called to remember what it means to be.