Artist Statement

My landscape paintings recreate the naturally occurring tableaus I witness, in all their mystery, while wandering in undeveloped spaces far from the built world. The Helderberg Plateau in the Hudson Valley gradually rises to meet the Catskill Mountain range west of the Hudson River. Residing here I find there is a rare power and magic in inhabiting one of the remaining wild places on earth.

The women painters of the Hudson River School have recently gained recognition for their depictions of the Hudson Valley and its environs and I see myself as a descendant of their painting tradition. While they portrayed the majesty of the American landscape, I am consistently aware that I paint the last remnants of a world that will eventually be overtaken by development or decimated by climate change. I regard my subjects simultaneously with joy and sadness and I invite my audience to join me as I appreciate and memorialize the transcendent experience of nature. The images I make are my counterweight to the assault of humanity on our world.

I work from photographs that fix in time a moment, through the mediums of oil on panel and gouache and watercolor on paper. I visit a particular scene many times, light my chosen subject in the field, photograph, crop or otherwise manipulate the image that will then serve as my subject in the studio. My canvases are small, 10” x 8” or less, and they are exact depictions of an occult scene I have encountered, the tunnel of a mouse or a hidden cavity under a thicket of raspberry bushes.

The Catskill Mountains, once termed, “the faery region of the Hudson,” by the 19th Century writer Washington Irving contain portals, entrances into a world covered in fae glamour, literal enchantments. I seek moments that capture the feeling of a spell cast or a door opening into another realm, a sacred  offering to viewers in a world increasingly void of magic.