My art is about my life-long love of nature.  I paint landscapes (or flowers, or architecture), largely on location, due to my passion for being planted smack in the middle of beautiful mountains, forests, canyons, river valleys, and deserts (the latter in the right weather).  I grew up loving this sense of place as a camper, hiker, boater, and skier.  Also, plein air painting from life in two or three hours is teaching me invaluable lessons about composition and how to render the natural immediacy of light, shadow, hue, texture, and movement in a loose, but representative painting.  I am currently focusing on rocks and trees.  I believe I have created a successful painting when the viewer can connect with it, remembering their own peaceful experiences in similar natural settings.

 

I have been working almost exclusively with soft pastels since I first tried painting several years ago.  I have held so closely to this medium due to its natural, earthy richness and pigment-dripping immediacy, particularly well-suited for plein-air landscape painting.  I usually like to add soft pastels to a watercolor under-painting and I routinely like to leave some of the watercolor textures and colors showing.