DEAN DAY GALLERY

ARTIST STATEMENT

"My paintings are a celebration of the mystery of nature and the promise and complexity of life that exists in nature. Whether I'm working on a landscape, a bird, or a figure, the work is about the experience of light and shadow, color and texture, the play between the seen and the unseen, between memory and imagination.  My visual language has evolved over the years but I seem to have settled on something that combines my love of abstraction with contemporary realism.

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The work reflects a personal history; countless walks in woods among pines, birches, aspens and childhood summers spent on Jekyll Island, GA where live oaks drip Spanish moss and marsh meets ocean.  I am most inspired by the quiet drama of nature; trees bending toward the light, silent reflections, sunlight breaking through clouds.

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As with all things in nature, there is that brief moment that says everything.  The bird that suddenly catches my eye through the window, pausing on a branch just long enough for me to get a photograph.  The quality of light and shade in a forest, under a tree, or as reflected in water.  The flower blooming today that wasn’t blooming yesterday.

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I work mostly on wood panels, sometimes using brushes and other times palette knives, combining heavy, thickly applied paint with watery washes that drip randomly. This process enables me to capture the spirit of the subject, its wildness. For wildness, as Bill McKibben writes in The End of Nature, stirs the imagination and creates in us 'the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever, and branches reaching forward just as far.'"