Keep your distance.

Local landscapes and a crafted color palette were my focus when starting these paintings. DISTANCE is a series of small paintings on paper and large 30x30 inch canvases.

I’ve really enjoyed the mixed media blending of acrylic, watercolor, and gouache paints with oil sticks and water-soluble crayons. The warm rich color palette creates a range of feelings from light easy mornings, storm gathering skies, or hot summer sunsets.

In my series MY FOREST I talk about giving “an outlying back roads view of my personal landscape”. This is also true for all of the paintings in DISTANCE.

The cliffs, foothills, and skies I painted stand along a highway I travel almost daily.

This highway is my personal landscape because I have traveled it all my life. I’ve gone past these hills on the way to camping and boating trips. I’ve looked out at the cliffs from the windows of school buses. I’ve cruised through them as I learned to drive; and taken family pictures at their feet.

This is the first group of paintings I’ve made in over ten years that doesn’t include any people or animals. When I tried adding figurative elements to these compositions they just didn’t fit. The feel immediately changed from a faraway landscape view to a zoomed in scene. The cliffs, clouds, and mountains needed space to breathe.

I was drawn to these subjects for their distant blurred appeal.

My painting practice has changed with the addition of more small works on paper. Through these studies and notes I’m learning new way of making marks, using more diverse materials, and mixed media techniques. I’m feeling a back and forth between what’s close and what’s far away.

A collection of purely abstracted landscapes is a step towards new sources of details I can use for close up figurative work.

I’m always looking for new ways to tell my stories. I like to bring a moody fantasy to everyday life. Creating outdoor spaces for truth and fiction to mix on paper and canvas is my goal for abstraction. Studying the landscape and looking for what I enjoy about it is always my goal.