Prairie (Blue Poles) Painting

Born, Montana, USA, also lived in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, now residing on the high prairie of Southern Montana surrounded by wide, open spaces. Over the years I have enjoyed using a variety of mediums in a variety of ways, from photography to painting, from realistic to abstraction. From small, intimate objects to larger than life works on unstretched canvas. I enjoy taking a big reality and condensing it down to a few small tokens or blowing up the small and mundane so as to be unavoidable to the viewer. My early photographs were manipulated to look like abstract paintings and some of the realistic paintings I’ve done over the years look like they are photographs. Recently, I’ve turned to painting loosely geometric abstractions. Sometimes a highly textured surface is built up layer after layer and the final layers are essentially controlled accidents coliding with the underlying shapes/textures. There is also a play between the observed surface in contrast to what appears to be a distance, a field, a void that gives the whole painting a three dimensional feel. If I had to briefly sum up my approach to art making, it would be to view it as a self imposed puzzle that is a challenge and eventually a joy to solve.