Artist Statement
I started painting in 1995 after years of looking at and thinking about paintings, but never really thinking about being a painter myself. Somehow I signed up for an oil painting class, and the first session was three hours long in an un-air-conditioned studio with temps over 100 degrees. By the end of the three hours, I was hooked. I continued to paint in that classroom studio for a few years, then rented space with another artist and have had a studio in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood since 2005.
Most of these paintings were done in the last five years or so, and draw on landscapes both local and exotic, some real, some imagined. Some come from a word or phrase that I can’t get out of my head, some from objects that catch my eye and won’t let go. I’m endlessly fascinated by the way the world flattens out and reshapes itself on the canvas, the way light and dark play tag, the figures that somehow take form on their own and finally decide to stay still.