Blurred Boundaries Painting

As an Arkansas River Valley native and traveler to many wonderful places in the world, I have always sought refuge and renewal in nature. It comforts and restores me, but also inspires me to create evocations of familiar scenes of distant mountains, vast fields, waterscapes and the creatures who live there, both in still-life and landscape. Painting or simply viewing a natural landscape calms and gives me a wonderful sense of contentment and pleasure. An art professor I admire describes my feelings well when he wrote, “I think landscape painting is the closest artistic genre to lyric poetry. Usually neither has a narrative, and while it takes time to read a poem or scan a painting, that time doesn’t seem real… it seems condensed into a single moment. Both the poet and the painter present a scene, but neither is purely descriptive; in both cases the feeling is the subject, not the scenery.” The natural world is the inspiration for my paintings, but the process is essential to my art-making. I have an impressionistic style. I love the smooth texture, blend-ability, and forgiveness of oil, my medium of choice. I paint with my fingers or a palette knife as often as I use a brush, and I usually cover my canvas with a fast-drying underpainting of earth-toned acrylic. Then, I add layers of oil, so that I can blend, scratch, scrape and remove some of it to let unexpected bits of color peek through the finished work. Like me, my artwork is direct and uncomplicated. It is meant to evoke feelings of simple pleasures, peacefulness and occasionally a smile.