My process of painting begins as a kind of soliloquy through which I work out my fascinations with the contemporary landscape and the connections that tie me to my place in the world. I discover painting sites without seeking them. Often motifs are the serendipitous results of trips to the grocery store or other practical routines of daily life.

I paint on location, executing small, quick studies in which I attempt to respond to the transience of light and weather. The challenge is to distill the essential color, form, and space from the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of nature using only my eyes and the language of painting. Balancing these outdoor studies are longer meditations worked out on a larger scale in the studio from drawings, photographs, and experimentation at the palette. The two practices complement each other but are essentially self-sufficient activities. When working outdoors I rarely think of the studies as preparations for studio paintings. If anything the reverse is true. A long season of studio work often drives me outdoors to escape the inevitable ditches I drive myself into when the direct reference to nature has grown thin.

Divesting myself of limiting preconceptions is a necessary condition of painting from observation, and so the act of painting is not so much about the resulting commodity as it is a challenge of consciousness. Receptiveness is my primary aim. The goal, ultimately, is to construct a living metaphor for my experience of the concrete world with paint, color, shape, and mark. The thrill when the first crude likeness appears is still as fresh and exciting as it was when I first started painting.

The paintings in this exhibition are my personal, pictorial responses to particular situations that I’ve encountered in my wanderings through our contemporary landscape. In working from observation it is the visual eccentricities of a given motif, their resistance to generalities, that I find most exciting and engaging as a problem for painting. The lay of the land, the urgency of dealing with transient effects of atmosphere and light on a given day, the subtle cultural pentimenti that lie just under the visible facture of the chosen subject; all of these, and more, overwhelm theory and force me to engage in the solving of a unique empirical problem. Writer Henry James characterized nature as the great "blooming, buzzing confusion." The act of painting, for me, speaks to an underlying order and connectedness that it is my struggle and my delight to discover and to share.

Traversing the territory between painting and printmaking has been a preoccupation since my twenties. The inherent informality of working with paper and ink is an aspect of monotype printmaking that I am particularly drawn to. Ideas and impulses can be explored quickly without elaborate preparation. The emotional tension of deferred gratification and the anticipation that surrounds the work up to the moment of printing infuse the activity with a rejuvenating sense of free play. And unlike painting, where one variation buries another and is forever lost, in the monotype process the cognate - the ghost image that the first proofing of the monotype leaves behind - allows one to not only explore variations but to preserve each state intact. The print sequence that unfolds over successive revisions documents a compelling evolution of thought and movement.

While painting is for me a satisfyingly direct manifestation of thought and action, printmaking is always mediated by the ink-to-paper transference of the printing process. The space between what you do to the plate and what emerges from the press is an intriguing place to work within. What you see is never what you get. Tones shift or don’t print at all. Accidents happen. The element of chance is always lurking in that space. But also a deft wipe of a rag, or mark of a brush or brayer can evoke in the print a rich and complex sense of form and space far beyond the seemingly modest means one sees on the plate. You learn to dance with the music and not try to control every aspect of the outcome. The painter’s attraction to the monotype process is a natural one, but also these forays of mine into printmaking have profoundly altered my attitudes and perceptions about my painting process.

My work is simply about being somewhere and paying attention. In a world increasingly abstracted by technology and language, the act of consciously taking time to experience an actual, concrete place in the world would seem almost an act of rebellion. I enjoy, and have learned to trust the tension that a specific place, a specific time, a specific set of complex conditions of light and space confer upon the process of painting. My aim is to capture, not the subject per se, but the energy of the struggle to see and respond to the visual particulars of the subject. In this way, even the false starts, and the many inevitable adjustments and revisions become necessary, meaningful and beautiful. I like the way that honoring a place circumvents the ruses of the ego and its baggage of set notions, making discovery, and authentic form possible. Painting, for me, becomes the means, like a mantra, of achieving a livelier state of being.