ARTIST STATEMENT

This summer I've been painting in oils and acrylic the Oregon light and landscape features from my own street in Oak Grove to the grandeur of the Willamette Falls and the Oregon coast ocean. I decided to use the season and the location and colors of Oregon to inspire my painting. 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 in the west.

In the recent past I have 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 hyper localized yet universal and global form of art; the personal portrait.

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 body fashioned by genetics, environment, other people, and the choices, chances and attitudes of a lifetime.

By focusing in on a specific human, an artist can tap into a universal stream of humanity and commonality.