Artist Statement
The landscape, especially the southern woods of my childhood and the Pineywoods of East Texas, is where I can feel the energy and hum of nature. It’s where time seems to collapse into a single moment. The layered glimpses of leaf and sky, foliage and trunk, litter and deadfall, reflections and stream bottoms, all collide and break apart like a kaleidoscopic image.
I worked outdoors for many years, both drawing and painting, then later using drawings as reference for studio works, and finally working from memory. Memory is personal, selective and generative. It distills and intensifies what is most important. Every painting starts with memory.
In the past few years, the visual vocabulary of my work has shifted dramatically, although the themes of time, metaphor and nature have remained paramount. This change came about as I worked to paint the act of looking rather than a unified field or view, and to establish a personal iconography from the pines and cedars, the white oaks, shallow pools, deadfall and the dark curved stream banks in my woods.
I am a writer as well as a painter. In 2020 my book Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor was published (Texas A&M University Press). It is a memoir of my time in Lennox Woods, an old growth southern hardwood forest near my home. I spent two years walking, observing and drawing. Over forty paintings resulted and what I learned about the forest and myself during that time still forms the bedrock of my practice--observation, memory, and a search for the open seam between the outward appearance of things and their deep meaning.
Artist Statement--In the Garden
Gardens exist in the space between control and surrender. While we shape them with intention, they resist complete domestication—plants sprawl beyond their borders, unexpected seedlings emerge, creatures claim their territory. This tension between the cultivated and the wild forms the heart of my painting practice.
My fascination with untamed landscapes—old growth forests, native prairies—naturally extends to the garden, where wildness persists despite our best efforts to contain it. It is this quality that has made gardens such potent sources of meaning across cultures and throughout time. From creation myths to everyday metaphors, gardens occupy both physical and symbolic space in our collective imagination.
My garden paintings do not present a unified, coherent view of the garden but rather capture the experience of being in one—the way attention shifts, how the eye moves from near to far, how present sensation mingles with recollection. Each painting contains multiple moments of looking, each slightly different in perspective, scale and time. I create this effect by depicting space in various ways within a single picture plane: stacked spaces with permeable boundaries, dramatic shifts in scale that refuse easy spatial resolution. These disruptions mirror how we experience gardens—not as fixed scenes but as accumulations of fragmentary impressions.
The creatures that inhabit my paintings—birds, insects, animals—serve as reminders of the garden’s untamed nature. They are both literal presences and symbolic figures, inviting viewers to consider their own relationship to wildness, to the natural world that persists alongside and within our human constructions.
My own garden serves as the primary site for this exploration, but my work reaches beyond direct observation. Oil sketches and drawings are made in the garden and in the studio. The oil sketches may be torn apart later to create small collages that allow me to reorganize what I’ve seen. I include memories of other gardens—places I’ve tended or simply moved through—noting how these experiences layer onto present observation. Historical references from Rococo paintings, Roman garden frescoes, and decorative motifs from wallpapers and textiles find their way into my work, sometimes as collaged fragments from my oil sketches, sometimes as visual quotations that disrupt scale and spatial logic.
I explore the garden as a threshold space where cultivation meets wildness, where human intention encounters nature’s resistance, and where the real and metaphorical continuously intertwine.
