Artist Statement:
For most of my life, I have been creating art inspired by the beautiful places I visit. It is with art that I am best able to express my great joy in exploring and connecting with the natural world. I grew up exploring and hiking in the mountains and rural areas of central Pennsylvania where I grew up. Even as a child, I found great joy in sketching and making elaborate drawings of the places I visited.
After attending art school in Washington, DC and living there for awhile after, I fell in love with the west after several visits during my vacations. Eventually, I decided to move to the desert & it was the best decision I ever made.
As an avid hiker, I spend most of my time in Wilderness, often exploring remote backcountry areas by myself. I hope to experience the natural world as far from civilization as possible and then to share my adventures and rambles through my art. I create bold compositions with unique angles, vibrant layers of color and loose brushstrokes to emphasize that these places are wild and dramatic.
I am especially interested in and challenged by the way changing light and shadows create spaces, transform color and influence mood in the landscape. I use these contrasts in light and dark to distort perspective, exaggerate colors and to create a new composition with a heightened dramatic atmosphere.
I am trying to share the way I am feeling in that space as much as I am trying to capture the essence of the place itself. In this way, my paintings are as much self-portrait, as landscape.
Within these dramatic spaces, I intend to show a subtle beauty where the viewer might never have thought to look. I hope to convey my excitement in seeing small, delicate wonders like the flowering cactus or the expansive and vertiginous views from a mountain peak. It is also my hope that the viewer of my art will come away with a new respect and appreciation for the world(s) around him or her and that, ultimately, more people will go discover, explore, cherish and protect these "new" worlds on their own.
Education:
1999-2000 non-degree art courses - American University, Washington, DC
1988-1992 B.F.A. - Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, DC
Awards & Distinctions:
2018-2019 - "Mojave Sage" - one of 5 works selected to be displayed on billboards across Las Vegas for ArtPop pubic art project
"Morning Creeps Into the Bowl of Fire" - purchased by National Park Service for permanent display at the Alan Bible Visitor Center at Lake Mead, NV
"Mojave Evening" currently on public display at REI in Green Valley, Henderson, NV
Exhibitions:
Selected Recent Exhibitions
2018
Landscapes - invitational group show - Las Vegas City Hall
2016
Solo exhibition - Lloyd D. George Federal Courthouse Rotunda, Las Vegas, NV
2015
Wild Nevada - juried group show - Sparks, NV
Why, Masterworks? - invitational group exhibition - Las Vegas City Hall, Las Vegas, NV
2014
50 Years of Wild Nevada - group exhibition - Sparks, NV
Why, Masterworks? - invitational group exhibition - Historic Fifth Street School, Las Vegas, NV
Artistic Influences:
I love all art, from the most minimal abstract to the most detailed realism. All of it excites & fascinates me. In art school, I obsessed over Francis Bacon after a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn. My interest early on was in figurative works. Some other influences were Kathe Kollwitz, Egon Shiele & more. In my senior year I started to gravitate to Vuillard, Bonnard & other Post-Impressionists. When I saw my first Cezanne in person, it started my journey into landscapes & I never looked back. It's always changing, but currently, I'm obsessed with the work of Felix Vallotton...those colors! I'm also reading a book about Georgia O'Keeffe, Emily Carr & Frida Kahlo & find much inspiration from these talented women.
Artist Tags:
landscape, southwest, west, western, desert, mountains
