Regional landscape is intertwined with my personal history. On my mother's side, I come from several generations of orchardists. Tending the land to raise cherries and apples in the Naches Heights of Eastern Washington was a year round effort and was essential to the livelihood of my mother’s family and of my ancestors. On my father's side, my relatives are rooted in pastoral western Massachusetts where my family line reaches back to the 19th century. A sense of place with regards to the natural environment is an overarching theme in my life. Painting landscape evokes memories of my own life history and enlivens ancestral memories from family stories passed down to me since I was a child.
My current body of work explores the landscape of my home state of Washington. I use traditional materials of oil on canvas to create compositions where the negative space of the dynamic skies of the Pacific Northwest plays a distinctive role to create a cinematic sense of atmosphere. Although I typically work in large scale, I am borrowing a page from the book of landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries that often recorded bucolic life of the outdoors in small, portable dimensions. Working in a scale that is tactile and personal enhances a sense of intimacy, like the sharing of an old photograph accompanied by stories, reawakening memories.
When creating art, I experience a feeling of timelessness where the veils of past, present, and future do not exist, only the eternal 'now'.