Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring Painting

- I am an abstract contemporary landscape painter working in acrylic. My art is rooted in real life images and textures, with a modern abstraction, often in a limited colour palette. Much of my work is about evoking a sense of place. While the paintings no longer always look like landscapes, they still feel like landscapes to me. I am also working with the idea of layers, and memory: how one memory leads to another, as well as how an image shifts depending on how the light hits it, particularly when metallic paint is used. Though there is a vast difference in the types of work I have created over the course of my life, the underlying thread in much of it is the environment, and stewardship of the planet. I paint abstracted scenes inspired by real-life beauty. Without some amount of social responsibility, these types of scenes will exist only in imagination. I think life is all about those moments where time stops, our individualities fall away, and we’re reminded of how we’re all connected-- one. I think that art is a “way in”. It is an equalizer, no matter where you come from, what language you speak. Now, more than ever, we must recognize that inter-connectedness. ************ Background: We do not have to speak the same language, nor share the same culture in order for art to speak to us: I grew up in Montreal, a metropolis of cultural diversity. Each part of the city was alive with its own unique energy. One of the universals amidst all of this diversity was, and is, art (music, being another). The dichotomy of growing up in a North American suburb, while being raised in the culture of a distant land, has perhaps influenced the ways in which I perceive the world. The same holds true for the way I see art, and create it. It is influenced by the world around me: by my time spent living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as much as suburban Maryland, and the DC area. It is influenced by the energy and essence of having been a Montrealer for most of my life, as much as the desire to once again visit the ever-elusive island, where my parents' lives began. ************ Art was always that thing I did for fun, that luxurious thing that I never had enough time for. I tried to squeeze it in whenever I could. Then, one day I got to the point where I was soon going to need to be able to work from home, in order to be with my children. I was then able to combine that luxury and fun into my week.