When I was much younger living in the grit of the Eastbay flatlands, my artwork celebrated the unexpected beauty of ordinary moments in time and place. Now years later, having moved to the coast, the place I find myself living in is filled with natural beauty, but the times are neither ordinary nor always to be celebrated.

In my latest work I am painting stories that try to understand and warn of the disquiet and danger I see in everyday reality.

Chaos seems endemic now to daily life. It is there unnoticed or ignored amidst the beauty and calm of a nurturing landscape. There are contradictions— unsettling portents. I am painting stories of these contradictions— the narrators are nature’s neutral witnesses.

I am working through a language of symbols— universal, personal, from memory as well as topical. The images are not intended as realism. I am drawing from my love of folk art, naive, obsessive and surreal art— mixing in art history.

It is real, but a step off from real.
 
Those are the larger oil on canvas works. As a balance perhaps, I continue to make short pose model portraits and figure work in pastel on paper. I’m trying again to celebrate each model’s energy— sometimes transporting them beyond the studio walls.