My first love was poetry, and I paint from the same place. As a graduate student I also studied the surrealists and abstract expressionists, and this led to further excursions into visual art, until finally I began doing scholarly work on American landscape painting and adjuncting in art history at various colleges. At some point I picked up paints and brushes and finally found my calling.

I am drawn to what I think of as the indeterminate or "mystical moods" of nature: twilights, mists, marshes, moonlight, dusk, dawn. I tend toward a "Tonalist" palette. My work expresses inner states embodied in the geometry and imagery of nature.

In other words, I am interested in the poetic beauty that can be coaxed from interaction with the landscape as well as in the new forms of artistic expression since modernism. For me, the greatest art invokes the "fallen" nature of knowing while at the same time asserting the beauty of our predicament.

I believe, with German artist Gerhard Richter, that "nature, in all its forms, is always against us because it knows no meaning," and that "every beauty that we see in landscape, every enchanting color effect, every tranquil scene..." is projection. But I also believe that for the same reason, we absolutely must pursue "every beauty" wherever it can be found. Because, as even Richter admits, "we are still capable of producing a spark of hope which we can also call love." I hope my paintings can convey something like this and bring some few shards of guarded light - if only a kind of enlightened and fleeting, quasi-optimism - into the darker places of the local world.