Your landscapes often evoke a deep sense of place.

How do you select the specific locations you paint, and what draws you to them?

“This is a question that I have often wondered about, and after all these years of painting, I feel even less certain about the answer than when I first began. There is so much mystery and intuition involved in choosing a painting spot. It has always seemed as though a spot chooses me, rather than the other way around. When I am quiet, listening, paying attention to a place, it is an opportunity to rest in the stillness and observe. The reason that a group of painters might go out to paint together and come away with vividly different pieces is that we all experience the world through our own filters, and my work for years has been to trust that small voice of intuition when it asks me to pause and look closely.”

You alternate between plein air painting and studio work.

Could you tell us more about how studying the environment directly influences your work?

“The small sketches that I make outdoors act as field studies, a way of gathering information from a place that can serve as a reminder of what it felt like to stand in that spot, how the air was moving, what it sounded like. The senses can be easily overwhelmed outdoors, with exposure to challenging temperatures and weather conditions, changing light, and even wildlife. When I'm painting, though, those chaotic elements fade and I enter a state of deep focus and a type of witnessing that only comes with painting. There is an unconscious recording of color notes, edges, a noticing of where the eye is drawn.”

“Back in the studio, those field studies are a touchstone as I make the larger canvases, drawing from the memory of that spot and reflecting on what resonated about it, where the power resided; was it the feeling of rising air, or the heaviness of the earth? In the studio I can simplify and expand. I can be more intentional about what elements remain and enjoy the scale of larger works and the impact they have in a space. I find that if I go too long without field work, the studio work begins to lose something, and both feel necessary. The field studies are a filling up of my reservoir; the studio work is a pouring out.”

Are there particular artists or movements that have impacted your work?

“As a young painter, I adored the bravado of painters like John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, and the poetic stillness and tension of Whistler and Twachtman and their fellow tonalists. There is a particular Twachtman painting, Arques-la-Bataille, that I would visit almost every week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was a student in NYC, long before I had any interest in painting landscapes, and it stuck with me on an unconscious level. I didn't understand at the time what was drawing me to it over and over, but I later learned that Twachtman spent his early years in Ohio just as I did, and I've often wondered if his experience of that particular landscape was the common thread.”

“In terms of influence, there is a relatively small number of painters that I would count as having clear impact on the direction of my work; I have a strong tendency to focus more on my direct interaction with the landscape and let that experience determine my direction rather than emulating others too closely.”