My current paintings are centered around common plants and their environments. They also describe a dialog between the sky and the earth.

As the plants send out flowers and shoots, growing higher, they become the go-between connecting the earth and sky, and the plants themselves intermingle with their surroundings. I have let these often small weeds become monumental in my paintings, running the whole vertical length of my canvases, uniting solid ground below with atmosphere above. I have encountered these plants in fields, beaches or rocky shores here in Southern Maine.

On an aesthetic level, I notice the color and shape of radiating petals on a flower with a specific number and formation, but observing the whole plant closely and identifying it through books opens up other meanings relating to its use as food, medicine or textile/building material. I welcome the diversity of tenacious weeds that grow without conscious planting or landscaping. Their suprises contrast with gridded plots of daffodils or tulips, or for that matter vast, uniform orchards or crop fields that fill abundant but homogenous produce bins in supermarkets across the country.

In my studio, forms of clouds, stones, plants, rolls of hay, or bodies of both land and water are malleable and change to fit my compositions. However, the subjects and their environments that I create are always informed by my sense of the different places I have lived or spent time.A century plant I painted in New Mexico relates to a sow-thistle I see and paint in Maine.
A tower of limestone blocks I painted in a quarry in Indiana relates to natural rock formations I saw and painted in New Mexico and to the shape of the rocky coast of Southern Maine. The name and identity of the forms change, but the scale and central placement of single, iconic, non-human subjects remains consistent in my work.

Back in my studio I try to generate the space I experienced standing or painting with my easel planted in a large outdoor space with the ground sweeping up under my feet and clouds rushing overhead. I try to get back to experiences I have had walking out into certain outdoor spaces and being struck by a feeling of harmony in the forms surrounding me.