ARTIST STATEMENT

Recently, I've been painting in oils and acrylic the Pacific Northwest light and landscape features from my own street in Oak Grove to the grandeur of the Willamette Falls and the Oregon coast ocean. I used the seasons and the locations and colors of Oregon and Washington to provide me with content for my explorations of light and color. I was taught color by one of the original Bay Area Figurative Painters, James Weeks, and painting the colors of Oregon is a great way to explore the area and the tradition of painting the West. Most of these paintings were painted on location (Plein Air) in one sitting.

I have always focused on portraits and still lifes.

In the Portland area, we celebrate a renewed craft spirit of food, chocolate, ale, technology, filmmaking, publishing, storytelling, animation, and fine art. These lifestyle elements populate my painting and provide a staging for space and color interactions only possible with paint. I strive to push the color relationships into a dynamic balance and resonance which are experienced in certain natural settings, where colored light is pronounced.

The lens of my painting looks through the current art and business trends of Portland and of my life here, especially the concepts and characters of stop-motion animation, the techniques and realities of advertising and digital communications, and the pervasive use of brand identity and product placement. Currently, these are some of the vehicles, structures, and architecture, where the space and color reality I am fascinated with can be explored.

Portrait painting was one of my first interests in painting, and I continue to paint portraits, and curated an invitational portrait show at The Alexander Gallery at Clackamas Community College in the fall of 2017. This was a unique opportunity to see how some modern NW artists interpret the subject of portraiture, to inspire each other, and to exhibit to the public a sample of current PNW portraiture.

Portraiture is one of the oldest forms of representational art, and one of the most important for the human desires of communication, expression, documentation and immortality.

A person's image contains not just visual information, but a presence created by a personality- a flesh and bones being fashioned by genetics, environment, other people, and the choices, chances and attitudes of a lifetime.

By focusing in on a specific little know human, an artist can tap into a universal stream of humanity. The hyper-localized portrait can often become a piece that speaks to many.