Drawing, for me, covers a vast array of activities that in some ways are akin to breathing and in other ways akin to surgery, or juggling the royal crystal and cacti. Intuitive and analytical at the same time. The idea of making a few twisted scratches with a pencil or pen, and then having those marks read as energy, space,light, and surface that describes or conveys visual experience is neverendingly puzzling and amazing to me. I constantly try to expand the possibilities by adding new elements to my vocabulary of marks and surfaces. I think my approach to constructing a drawing, painting , or print has now become homogenous and therefore more connected to a single language (that, at least, I can understand).

The surface of a drawing or painting is similar to the surface of a print. My prints are the result of many layers of drawing, etching, redrawing, removing, overprinting, surface residue, deep lines, shallow lines, old decisions, new decisions, abandoned directions, mistakes, accidents, conceptual unity, and endless possibilities and combinations of references to time, space and place. The paintings I am presently working on are an outgrowth of the same approach. I start with a concept of a space/place I want to describe and begin drawing into a layer of wet paint. The soft surface of paint lets me inscribe lines into the surface in much the same way a line is etched into the surface of a metal plate. I have begun to use different colors of surface paint as well as different colors of pencil line to create more spatial variation as well as surface variation. The main difference in surface development occurs when layers of paint start to build the surface out at the same time the mark is digging in. The resulting layering and inscribing produces a complex surface that holds the history of the process and hides underlayers of decisions and associated effects. The more complex the surface becomes, the abstract it tends to appear, the more the vocabulary becomes the language, the more real it becomes to me.

Experience of the landscape is one of time and space. Still Life is still, static, and controlled. Landscape is moving, ever changing, dynamic, alive, and unpredictable. A drawing/painting/print is not a photograph, it is a record of TIME and SPACE, and the memories, observations, reactions, conscience and sub-conscience, and much more of the artist reacting to (not coping) the place. I try to include as much as possible when possible. I think of the "landscape of the painting/drawing/print" as absolutely REAL and inhabitable even thought it may be completely constructed, invented, and abstract. I work "inside the image" to include wind, smell, fear, history, all those things that are present in our minds as we sit alone in a wilderness, (we bring it ALL with us), otherwise we wouldn't find it interesting.(?)

The paintings/prints include simple landscape themes that are basic to universal experience, the "fence" as an enclosure and limitation, the "alley" as excluded backzone dreamset, the "backyard" child memory safe haven of play, the "woods" as a mystical place wilderness of trees (I'm from Kansas, trees & forests are mysterious places, ask Dorthy), the "prairie" unlimited space with earth & sky & always wind, the "path" as a place to transverse a picture space, etc.