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Artist's Statement

I am a Pacific Northwest artist working in oil and ceramics, among other media. My most obvious influences are Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Emily Carr, and more broadly, Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Fauvism.

Although I did take a few art classes in college (at The Evergreen State College and Seattle Pacific University) I consciously decided not to major in art. After graduating from Evergreen in 1989 I didn’t do much art for a couple of years. Then I started painting. I painted and painted and painted, from about 1991 to 1994. I showed my paintings a few places in Seattle: The Pioneer Square Saloon, the Colourbox, The Aha Theatre lobby, Highline Community College Library gallery, Art/Not-Terminal.

Many of my paintings during this period were heavily influenced by my recent discovery of and encounter with the art of the British Columbian painter Emily Carr (1877-1943.) The first time I saw Carr’s work, I basically said, “Damn, she did exactly what I’m already trying to do.” It was thus impossible not to be heavily influenced by her. It had to do with the color and the approach to form and energy in her forest paintings.

Since that time, I have had cycles of greater and lesser productivity in visual art. Sometimes a couple of years would go by with no paintings at all, but lots of songwriting (another of my major creative pursuits) and always at least a baseline amount of sketching and drawing. While living in Reno, Nevada from 1999 to 2001, I experimented a bit with watercolors, and may return to them at some point in the future.

I moved to Portland, Oregon in late 2001 after thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. I returned in force to oil painting and also took up a new medium: the painting of designs on ceramics. I have now completed several series of painted tiles, plates, and bowls. But regardless of how many times I stray into other ventures, I always return to painting. I am a painter. In Portland I have completed a few dozen new oil paintings (showing them at several venues,) refining and evolving my technique and beginning now to bring to the canvas subjects informed not only by the forests and landscapes of Cascadia but the rich worlds of myth and my nightly dreams. Along with writing and songwriting, oil painting is something I have to do. For me, there is something expressable through it that is not expressable in any other way.

Never one to limit the media in which I am willing to work, in 2006 I embarked upon and completed an enormous sculptural project in the medium of cob, a concrete-like mixture of clay, water, sand, and straw. The result is a 200 square foot cob house in the back yard of a friend in the Kenton neighborhood of Portland. I currently live in this earthen house. (See photos of the cob house project.)

Paintings | Ceramics | Drawings | Top