I embrace this fundamental assumption of painting: to represent phenomena as an image made with paint and delivered by gestures of the hand and brush to a flatish surface. In representing nature I seek to evoke a feeling that the ordinary is really extraordinary. I want to establish that the beingness of the world has a secret voice and that even a pencil or pine cone participates in this beingness. Nature is veiled divinity, painting is about both.

For all of its contradictions and its unassuming honesty still life is my preferred genre. The hallmark of still life is the absence of the human form. I understand this position to be akin to the attitude and practices of ascetics and toward the same purpose. The other worldly remoteness contributed by this conspicuous absence is complicated by a visual emphasis on touch and spatial relationships of inanimate bodies. This duality is a familiar experience that parallels our own nature, at once material and spiritual. It becomes expressive of our inner and outer experience of life and the tensions they place on each other.

Painting is not primarily an aesthetic activity nor is it an alternate language with which we express social or political views. It is, most importantly,  a means of communicating with the secret voice hidden behind all material form. Less a means of saying, it is a means of knowing. These objects are less from tables and more from dreams or visions. The spaces they inhabit are ambiguous. They insist on a reality that is beyond the mundane yet wrapped up in its language.