Behind the Restaurant Depot, Newtown Creek, Queens, NY Painting

The landscape I am most compelled to paint is the urban fringe with its jumble of rusting industrial sites, aging infrastructure and funky waterways that can be found on the outskirts of our cities. It is here among the ruins of our contemporary culture that I uncover stories about the everyday world around us, stories that reflect how we have changed and continue to change the environment. All of my paintings are done on location. I spend hours roaming around an area until I find something that resonates with me. Once I do, I set up my easel and return to a site many times. A large painting can take up to three months to complete. The process of painting on location over a long period of time is crucial to my working method because it allows me to form a deeper connection to a particular place through careful observation and personal interaction with the people I meet there. While talking to people in the area, I learn a lot about the sites that I am painting. I find that this interaction, both with people and the environment, makes the method by which I work as important as the final painting. Although my paintings are very detailed, I am less concerned with reproducing an exact documentation of a scene and more interested in capturing the spirit of a place. In 2004, I moved from my long-time residence in New Jersey to New Rochelle, New York, and since then I have been painting in the outer boroughs of New York City, primarily in the Bronx but also in Brooklyn and Queens.