About me

I am an observational artist who paints to watch the image of another world emerge as I work. Whether I am painting a landscape, an animal, or a human face, what activates my longing for the work is watching a lifelike character manifest from a mess of paint and brushstrokes. At the same time, these earthy materials of painting fascinate me and demand attention as subjects themselves. With this paradox in mind, I aim for a realism that celebrates the quirks of my subject while hinting at something archetypal and timeless, and for a style that is sensitive but doesn’t hide the materiality of paint on a two-dimensional surface. The artists of the past that I spend the most time with tend to be Baroque-era painters who are masters of light and human character–Vermeer, Caravaggio, Velázquez; and certain Impressionist figurative painters–John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Joaquin Sorolla, Bertha Wegmann. The contemporary artists I most admire have fresh ways of combining representative and figurative skill with an expert expressionist use of color. Lost or deliberately disrupted edges especially excite me.

I spent the first twenty-five years of my working life as a humanities professor. It seems all I did during this time was write, write, write. I was an obsessive workhorse of a writer. Then, I spent the last seven years of that career researching a book on the religious traditions of Deaf communities around the world. Spending so much time learning about the souls of Deaf people and their visual communication flipped a switch in my brain, and now all the energy I poured into writing goes into making art.

Because of my background, my artistic work might be better described using the terminology of literary theory rather than the lingo of contemporary art movements. I love the patterns and rhythms of verbal or visual poetry and the ephemeral wonder expressed in good nature writing, but I also have an underlying subversive streak that imagines what it would be like to deconstruct the characters in my paintings and play with their nature as mere two-dimensional images in paint. I suspect I’ll explore this more in the future.