Making art is an essential and defining part of who I am and how I live.  I see so much that intrigues me, and I am endlessly challenged to express what I see and how I feel in my own way, on paper or canvas.

I am a watercolor and oil painter, and my paintings always begin as drawings. My paintings appear to be realistic, but they are carefully conceived and designed around abstract shapes, values, colors, movement, and positive and negative spaces. While my subject might be, for example, a traditional landscape, I believe that my approach gives it a more contemporary feel ... and results in a painting which conveys my insight and my personal reaction to my subject, not merely the visual facts.

I am a passionate “plein air” painter, and I take tremendous pleasure from doing my painting outdoors, on location.  I set my easel up on sidewalks, in parks or gardens, on the beach, wherever I am inspired by the landscape or the architecture. While outdoor painting may not be physically as comfortable as painting in the controlled environment of the studio, I believe that the total sensory experience of being literally inside one’s subject, leads to far more expressive and exciting works of art.

Recently I have been experimenting with nontraditional surfaces for my watercolors, such as gessoed paper, clayboard, and canvas, varnishing them, and framing them without glass. The process and the results have been most exciting and satisfying to me. While the paintings on these surfaces may lose some of the typical transparency of traditional watercolors, they have a greater depth, solidity, and strength, which appeal to me.