Cultures across the span of history have gravitated to the mountains for peace and clarity. We feel the dangerous excitement of a raging storm, it thrills and terrifies all in its path. Creating paintings using mountains and storms as subject matter allows me to express my thoughts, emotions, and love of nature. I delight in the effects of light, the opposing darkness, and color, always looking for new ways to let the light show through in my work. Light relays the metaphor of hope and love.

Taking inspirational photos while skiing, hiking, and living among these beautiful mountains and beneath the big western sky, I am attracted to and bear witness to the sublime. Ultimately, my ideas come from a place where memory, reality, and imagination intertwine.

Using these source photos and memories, I begin with a few quick compositional sketches, then move to the metal panel and paint. Brayers have been the applicator of choice recently because I can get a lot of paint on the panel quickly, blending and building the thin veils of color as I go. I like painting from my home studio so I can take frequent breaks. When returning to the studio with fresh eyes, I often will see a flicker of something that I can build on. I like to work wet-on-wet in a continual process, adding and subtracting as I go. I feel the rhythms of the landscape and often use squeegees to follow the undulations of the land as well as the imagined air currents in my skies. This either exposes the reflective metal surface or adds the invisible dimension I perceive with paint.

Deconstruction. By scraping, I expose the reflective silver, making a shimmering river or reflections on a lake. Buffing, I create the illusion of movement to the backlit edge of a cloud. In my more abstract work, I find spatial rhythms and move the viewer through the two-dimensional plane by pushing the paint into overlapping folds made with my tools. I use different solvents to melt the paint off the metal and varnish to make pebble-like textures on snow and moonlit skies.

“When Byron writes of his wish to mingle his soul with the mountains, the ocean and the stars, he echoes over a century’s worth of thought about the relationship between human beings and the grand or terrifying aspects of nature.” Professor Philip Shaw

I want to awaken this primary need and connect with the viewer through the language of art.