Artist Statement
My paintings are, first and foremost, painterly landscapes—celebrations of paint itself: its substance, color, and capacity to build form. Each work emerges through a sequence of gestures and revisions, where process and product become inseparable. Rules are set, then broken. Chaos presses against order. The resulting work lies somewhere between a wrestling match and a dance recital.
I am drawn to abstraction that holds traces of landscape, gesture, and thought—like Robert Motherwell’s expressive restraint, Philip Guston’s restless searching, and Richard Diebenkorn’s grounded lyricism. The landscape of northeastern Minnesota continually shapes my sensibility. Lake Superior, vast and unpredictable, evokes the sublime—humbling, disorienting, and elemental. Yet the interior lakes, woods, rivers, and trails offer intimacy and warmth—a gentler, enclosing presence.
These experiences of place naturally extend into a broader sense of landscape: physical, psychological, emotional, and painterly—a field where perception, memory, and material intersect. My painting is foremost a visceral act—an encounter with substance and sensation. The drag of the brush, the weight of pigment, and the slow emergence of form ground me in the present. My passion for perennial gardening mirrors this process and influences my approach to painting. In both, I work with what resists control—cultivating, cutting back, allowing for renewal and surprise. The garden teaches patience, intimacy, and the beauty of cycles; the studio carries that same rhythm of attention and renewal.
I am drawn to the push and pull—between impulse and intention, figure and ground, line and shape, geometric and organic, color and light—which echoes the resistance and responsiveness of the paint itself. Each work is built through time, movement, and engagement. My paintings should never feel fully resolved—only paused—holding the tension between revealed and withdrawn, seen and sensed, between the intensity of making and the quiet persistence of being.
I have a Master of Liberal Studies from the University of Minnesota and an undergraduate degree in Studio Art. My graduate thesis combined writing and painting to explore the interplay of art, nature, and culture in America.
