As a painter I am interested in exploring the use of fabrics and other materials with differing textures and light reflecting qualities to capture the sensuality of the human body and the natural environment. While I am especially drawn to fabrics like satin which reflects light and velvet which absorbs it, their interaction with traditional art mediums such oil paint and oil pastels as well as the new polymer mediums and industrial products such as cement and sandpaper offer a rich field for investigation.

For the last five years I have been creating mixed media pieces that aim to evoke images of landscape or water. Sometimes these images are more fragmentary, such as light shining on water; sometimes they feel like an actual landscape even though no such place exists. For several years, I executed these pieces primarily on wood. The multi-layering process begins with a covering of polymer medium, followed by a textured layer of cement, which is then partially or wholly covered with fabric, usually satin. The painting surface is then worked with paint- acrylic and/or oil - as well as oil pastel, charcoal, prismacolor, graphite, and/or ink. Although the work is abstract, the layers of different materials under the painted surface help to generate depth and light - light that changes depending on the position of the viewer. The texture and/or reflective aspect of a given piece in turn help to evoke a sense of landscape or water in the mind of the viewer.

More recently I have taken up the challenge of blending photographic realism with abstraction in the same piece, still using mixed media and focusing on nature. These pieces begin with detailed charcoal drawings. The drawings are printed digitally on paper or canvas, and then worked over with acrylic media of various kinds and paint, charcoal, and colored pencil. The basic charcoal drawings for these pieces have been landscapes. The completed "overwork", now mixed media pieces, are still landscapes, but the abstraction has added color, texture, and some mystery to what the viewer is seeing. At the same time, I have also continued to explore texture and light with work on canvas and wood.

Aside from straightforward charcoal drawings of figures and portraits, I approach painting the human figure in the same manner as mentioned above. That is, I usually cover the canvas with fabric before working on the figure and I used a mixed media approach when completing the work. My sense is that human beings usually have physical and emotional imperfections that affect their appearance. The use of fabric as an underlay for a painting as well as other media creates wrinkles and blemishes, imperfections that become part of the work. In real life, when we get to know a person usually these physical imperfections become much less important; they are not the focus of the relationship, and so we tend not to see them. The same happens with a painting that has imperfections. As we become familiar with the gestalt, the imperfections tend to disappear.