Artist Statement

The paintings you see within this web site - mostly oil on canvas, painted in thin successive layers- represent the last 15 years of my 30-year career as an artist, although all my earlier efforts have led directly to these paintings.

I started as a photographer and still produce photographs - See my "Portfolio" page. I had a basic course in photography in my last year of college. Ever since that class, my first experience in visual arts, I've had a mild compulsion to create visual images that strike a chord in me.

When I first began showing these paintings, my first response was a little feeling of shock - "Roads? All my paintings have roads?" (Even occasionally when I do a painting that doesn't have a road, it still has that atmospheric quality and looks into the distance). It's not a scheme or plan - that is, to paint paintings with roads.

It's just that roads are a marvelous vehicle for taking one's imagination into a painting, especially one that evokes the sort of emotional qualities that I like for these paintings to have. What are these emotional qualities?

If I'm successful, the viewer should know...

"The artist's function is the mythologizing of the environment and the world."

-Joseph Campbell

"Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on,
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known."

-J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Hobbit