What Stayed With Me: Painting Nature from Memory

For the past three decades, I’ve been drawn to a particular challenge: taking the chaos of nature and giving it a place to settle on canvas. There’s something I love about standing in the middle of that disorder — the wind, the shifting light, the noise of a place — and trusting that some kind of order can be drawn out of it without losing what made it feel alive in the first place.

Back in the studio, I’m working from memory more than observation. And memory is an unreliable translator — it drops things, exaggerates others, blurs edges that were once sharp. I’ve come to think that unreliability is actually part of the material I’m working with. What ends up on the canvas isn’t a record of what I saw out there; it’s a record of what stayed with me.

I don’t go into a painting chasing perfection, or even a sense of being finished. A painting is really just a point where I decide to stop, not a place where everything resolves. What I hope happens instead is that you find something in it that catches you — something that lets your eyes travel, make connections, find a little excitement and a little rest, both at once. If it can hold those two things together, I feel like it’s done what I wanted it to do.

From here, I’ll be posting regularly about the work as it develops.