Back in 2001, I took a month-long artist’s retreat deep in the woods of British Columbia living in a tent on a mountainside with no electricity or running water.  I intended to focus on photography which had been a passion of mine for at least a decade, but my camera broke on the first day there.  What to do... I purchased some acrylics from the on-site "store" (a woodshed stocked with art supplies) and spent my days in this primitive paradise painting on found wood.  I haven't stopped since.

While I now favor oils over acrylics, my medium of choice is encaustic, which allows for lots of possibilities in creating layered, mixed media pieces.  And I love the element of serendipity inherent in the never-really-sure-what-you're going-to-get fusing process.

As was the case with photography, painting reminds me to take time to absorb the natural world, and my hope is that my work somehow reflects bits of beauty that have seeped in, punctuated by my obsession with color.

In particular, I am fascinated with how visually pleasing nature’s randomness can be; the way a row of trees is capriciously arranged, how chance groupings of flowers  color a field, the geometrical patterns created by plots of land in a countryscape, the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns branches choose to make - configurations that present themselves with confidence; like there could be no other way.   

In the confines of my studio, “the beauty of randomness”  finds its way into my work through my processes and media choices:  creating bold, thick marks with a palette knife, partially painting over several unrelated layers of oil paint, using a torch to completely transform the texture and expression of an encaustic painting, constantly adding and scraping away layers of wax.

Intuition, imagination, chance, and a fair amount of sensibility hopefully coalesce into something we might call beautiful.

Oh, and when I am not painting, I am a high school math teacher ...