I paint – on cotton with textile paints, which I then stitch.

I also paint on canvas and masonite with oil paints, mostly plein air.

My artistic aim is to convey the context, the meaningful encounters, which I have with external world of urban-scapes, landscapes, and personal-scapes.

Golden Canyon (Death Valley) Revisited. 52″ x 58″, Oil on canvas, 2009

A writer and observer of landscape, Jennifer Jane Marshall,  says humanity’s concept of landscape is “a hodgepodge of sensations, impressions, meanderings, and insights: real embodied experiences in a real, encompassing place.”  (p. 196, of Landscape Theory))

This hodgepodge of the realities of the personal impressions and the external world is what I undertake to retain within my paintings.

Blossom Time, 12″ x 16″ Oil on masonite, 2008

My immersion in the world around me has been conveyed in a number ways. I do panoramas, for example, capturing scenes over days or weeks. In From the Diamond Grade I painted a single view on seven 12 x 16″ panels, imaging a a 12 hour time period, 6 AM to 6 PM.  I The Amargosa I grabbed a month’s worth of panorama at the Mojave Desert . The Amargosa, painted plein air at the head of the Amargosa Valley from a barn studio at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, is 5 feet by 28 feet and can be presented cyclorama style. In a different panorama, of the St. Johns (suspension) Bridge, in Portland, Oregon, I  presented the tawdry industries and lush western hills across the water with the bridge coming at me as I painted beneath its eastern piers. More recently, I completed “More”, a collection of eighteen-plus panels from the Petrified Forest National Park, to be presented together as a single semi-rectangular piece.

I do my work in multiples because I’m fascinated with what happens when I return again and again to a place, time, or personal insight. My textile work, which using traditional quilting techniques, explores landscapes and personal meanings in series, also trying to capture the fullest possible context.

I have kept notes about three of my artist residencies in my Residency Journals on this blog. I’ve been a contributor to Art and Perception as well as an essayist on the Henri Art Magazine.

“A mystical experience, says Marilyn Robinson, author of Gilead and Home, “would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. … You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.”

Indeed, ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.