Tomorrow Never Comes (oil on canvas 2019)

Apparently, I have become a landscape artist, although when I was learning how to draw and paint, landscape was never an area that interested me very much. My love of Rembrandt once had me thinking that I would be primarily a figurative artist and after discovering Giorgio Morandi during my senior year of college, I spent years painting nothing but still-life subjects. It was my move to rural northern Maine that fostered my penchant for landscape subjects. I have always liked to spend a lot of time outdoors, not just drawing and painting, but walking, running, cycling, and hiking. The world I live in now is about 99.9% landscape and reminds me of the woods and farmland that once surrounded the neighborhood that I grew up in and where I spent so much time during my formative years.

There are several aspects of the landscape that appeal to me as an artist. The ever changing light and color, which are always perfect, provide a bottomless well from which to draw both knowledge and inspiration and can give the same subject a different appearance as each hour passes into the next. The delicate balance between order and chaos which exists everywhere in nature is something that I strive for in my work as well. Beneath what can appear to be a savage and violent disarray of forms is a system of such complexity as to defy human understanding. I am surrounded by vast, open areas and huge skies, interpolated by dense, almost impenetrable forests and woods, all of which provide ample fodder for someone engaged in the study of creating the illusion of three dimensional space on a flat surface. In spite of the frigid cold during winter, the vicious, blood-thirsty black flies in Spring, and the occasional north wind that can send a canvas or drawing board sailing through the air into the next county, I enjoy working outside in the fresh air.

I made a conscious decision to move my practice more indoors a few years ago as a means of finding a more personal mode of expression that is less tethered to description of specific places and more about my unique way of experiencing the world, the decade and more that I spent traipsing about the landscape near my home with drawing board or paints in hand has made a lasting impact on me and still influences everything that I do. Although my practice has moved more into the studio and I've turned inward for inspiration, I remain, metaphorically at least, an painter of the outdoors.