Artist's
Statement
I am an oil painter, and
have been living in Mexico since 1990. Mexico, with its dramatic
landscape, the colors, light and its people are what inspire the
majority of my work. I am equally happy painting a landscape as
I am composing scenes with people and animals or colorful street
scenes. I paint on location and in the studio. Painting ‘from’
life, but also painting ‘a’ life, my life, scenes from my experiences
of living in Mexico.
I want to share the beauty that I see every day by
arranging bits of color and life to tell a story. Drawn to the
colors of fleeting light effects on the landscape and inspired
by the colors that I see, I try and match them fairly accurately.
However, I also interpret, exaggerate and push color in a way to
convey how the scene makes me feel. Color combinations and juxtapositions
are a lot of what make a subject appealing to me: unique to a certain
place at a certain time and varying under different lighting conditions.
My painting style is representational. At times I
am influenced by the impressionists, in that I want to capture
light effects and color and sometimes sacrifice detail. A controlled
chaos or loose spontaneity is my favored look, although each color
and stroke is well thought out and carefully placed. I try and
convey to the viewer my feelings about the scene through my use
of color and brushwork. I’ll let the subject, my mood, or both
determine how much detail is required to complete each painting.
The paint application is important to me. It is a
very personal facet of my work. An artist's brushwork and paint
handling is what sets his work apart from another artist’s interpretation
of the same view. It is as unique as a fingerprint and cannot be
copied. I not only brush paint on, but lift it off, or smear it
with a finger or paint rag. It is often the lifting off of the
paint that gives the look I am after.
Traveling and painting is something
that I love to do. A fresh set of eyes on a new landscape is good
for the art spirit. It pushes me to handle different challenges.
I love painting on the east coast of the US, on Cape Cod and in
Maine. But I always long to return to Mexico and paint where my
heart is. |
