For me art making is as much about process as product. Beginning with a set of colors, rough composition, and choice of size/format/support I explore a process of making through improvisation, chance and discovery.

My paintings are inspired by landscape and abstractions. In a range of subtle colors and painterly effects I aim to to express my feelings, moods and thoughts. Working in different sizes during the past several years, I make small sketch and larger abstract paintings. The images come from my memory and observation. Recalling experiences of watching moving water in very small streams to rivers, lakes and oceans I depict swirling, surging, tumbling and imploding movements to create a mood or atmosphere of immersion and envelopment in a brilliant and dusky light. I use open brushwork and color to explore a way of seeing a place that is an abstract invention on the verge of recognizable image. I also make painterly sketches of landscapes that attempt to capture the color of a place while abstracting its image.

I am inspired byLeonardo Da Vinci's Deluge drawings, where the order found in the chaotic and catastrophic is recorded and orchestrated through the language of drawing. In Da Vinci's drawings I respond to the depiction of the moving, crashing water through line and tone as well as the combination and layering of movements of whorls of water.

My paintings contain landscape, abstract and figurative elements. There is a sense of deep space in my pictures in combination with layered flat shapes. The shapes lack substance and create formless atmospheres that suggest sensations of liquids and water. My paintings are abstract in the sense that there is no image depicted but I use a language of rendering to describe the spirals and swashes of paint that are like liquid splashes of shapes frozen at a point in time. I like open brushwork and color in the tradition of romantic and naturalistic painters Turner and Constable. I like this painting by Sargent in the way that the color and brush strokes are one in expressing the image, the choice of colors and how the image fills the canvas with a view of ground.

Some contemporary artists whose work I've seen and liked in the past few years are:

Dana Schutz
Jen Omaitz
Amy Casey
and Kehinde Wiley