My art studies really began in earnest when I was in college. After an interlude in the Navy I returned to school under the GI Bill. I studied with Herman Maril, a Provincetown painter, and then did graduate work with Zoltan Sepeshy at Cranbrook. But even earlier I remember being taken, as a small boy, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It was brand new at the time and my memory of first seeing Andrea del Verrocchio, The Master of the Osservanza, George Bellows and Edouard Manet is infused with the smell of fresh concrete. Later I often visited the Phillips Collection, especially on Sunday afternoons when there was generally a free concert. So John Marin, Nicholas de Stael, Karl Knaths and Pierre Bonnard have a musical cachet in my recollection of the early days.

My teachers have been all the artists whose works I have admired and the many students I’ve had over the years. Various travels and the things I have read and thought about have accumulated a sensory odyssey. The paintings are a response to all of this. Their evolution has been relentlessly influenced by landscape as the recurrent theme. Nature has been the abiding motif in American painting and I am surely a product of all that has gone before me. Painting is actually language. For me it is a matter of interpreting the reactions that I experience in various places, overlaid with my own sensibility. It is an effort to convey a feeling - a lyrical authenticity. As Robert Motherwell has said, “...so that the feeling leaps from the artist’s heart to the viewer’s heart without any intervening mechanism, no words, no explanations.”

There is unique strength and resolution in landscape as subject matter. While studying the American Civil War some time ago I was drawn to the battlefields of Antietam at Sharpsburg, MD and Gettysburg in nearby PA. The issue for me was the way in which knowledge could modify experience - that the awareness of what had happened there could make such a lush pastoral setting vastly different, redolent of violence and suffering despite its natural appeal to the eye. It was a pensive notion that motivated my efforts for more than ten years. The subject became that inherent disconnect between observation and cognition that forged an entirely new version of the scene. The transformation of a visual setting by the events which have taken place there has been a challenge that has preoccupied me because it proposes something deeper than appearances. Painting is an eloquent means of getting beyond the surface, of invoking our visual inheritance through the means of metaphor.

Similarly, the proximity of the sea has been a formidable source for me from the outset. Its moodiness and its ceaseless variations in color and shape, especially when it meets the shore, provoke visual consequences which are freighted with exuberant suggestiveness. Gradations of color, atmosphere and light become the subject. Always present, they are unfailingly different and evocative. The time I have spent on the Chesapeake and the coast of Maine is a rich accretion of memory/imagery. Its poetic appeal has the same improvisational character as does the landscape.

When all is said and done, for me painting is color. The rest is selection, invention, modification, synthesis. The order imposed by the artist on color shapes, linear activity, surfaces and textures is the matrix of all art. In arrangements of form, the harmonies and dissonances derived from the tumult of perception provide expressive fecundity that challenges any conventional response. It is not enough to just represent what is there. It must be transformed, its special character given a new heightened reality. To call forth from it something particular, a combination of observation and intellect rather than either of those things by itself - that is what I seek to do. Experience can modify the character of organic form. The composition becomes more expressive, more genuine when it is most imbued with a personal vision that gives it the validity of poetic reality. It is a language without words which magnifies human experience.