Artist Statement
Artist’s Statement
Most people feel separate from Nature. It’s as if they are seeing it through a television screen or feeling confronted by the nature in front of them. I feel WITH nature. A part of the energy. Experiencing it as the air does as it floats through the canyon, as the bear does just “being” while enjoying a fresh sunrise light show.
When I am in Nature, it is as though I am a flower or a mountain or a coyote and animals respond to me as such. In my orchard when a mother bear meandered between my home and I, we just calmly looked each other in the eye in silent communication. Then she just turned around with her two cubs and went around the other side of the house. She and cubs resumed lounging, playing and munching apples while I watched and photographed (from back inside the house…I do respect that they are wild). Hiking, I have ascended a mountain with a herd of Elk on a parallel ridge…just 80 feet apart doing our own thing. I have watched bobcats kill prey close by and play afterwards on a rock outcropping while I had been arching my arms around doing my Tai Chi. No confronting, no fear… just cohabitating.
This is what I am interested in conveying in my work. My hope is that through viewing the Life in my work people will become more interested in being in our wild places or a the least preserving them for further generations.
I am now approaching 25 years of selling my work. Twenty of those years have been painted exclusively En Plein Aire (standing in nature for hours, witnessing and receiving constantly changing information). Most of that work was in the pastel medium. Then I went through a period where I needed to paint BIG and worked exclusively in oils for a few years. Now I am back to doing both mediums, mostly in the studio. I have developed a drive to convey certain conditions or designs that are not conducive to the high speed necessity of plein aire painting.
My creative process currently involves a lot of thought and planning that can take a couple days before I even start laying brush or pastel stick down. I just took a daring two year growth sabbatical where I did less showing and marketing while concentrating on study and experimentation in order to take my work to a higher level. The sabbatical was successful in renewing my fresh and excited feelings about my creative adventure. I invite you to enjoy the results.
