I am a painter who learned to paint the old fashioned way as an apprentice to two different artists. Danni Dawson opened my eyes to the possibility of making a life as an artist - teaching me how to think and live as one before sending me on to her teacher, Nelson Shanks, who passed on his own high standards for discipline and technique.

I work almost exclusively with oil paint for many reasons, chief among them is that I love the pace of working in oils - the hours and days it takes for a painting to unfold - having time to manipulate the paint before it dries, applying a thick brush stroke and watching it dry just as I placed it.

I paint portraits, landscape, and still life and I am increasingly drawn to the plein air tradition of painting out-of-doors. Studying the interplay of light and shadow is at the heart of my landscape work. Whether I am outside or in my studio, I try to capture a moment, creating a smaller but equally beautiful world on canvas.

The human face is the first thing I can remember wanting to draw, and it has remained a fascination and challenge to this day in all of my portrait work. Still life is a slower, more contemplative kind of painting. Sometimes my still life arrangements express an emotion I’m feeling, and sometimes I paint objects simply because they are beautiful, and I enjoy exploring their formal construction over time in the north light of my studio.

When I was a child, I would come across things like horse chestnuts or milk weed pods that seemed too beautiful and precious to just leave, so I would bring home bags of them and on the back porch they would stay till they rotted. Now when I find these treasures, I paint them, and I feel I have captured them forever, and it connects me to my aesthetic beginnings.