The content of my paintings lies beyond the visible features of woods and rocks and water.  My intention is to convey the sense of a place; the moving air, the solidity of rock and the transience of water and the strength of the ground beneath.  I feel a great affection for the otherness of the natural world, for a place which I have just entered which existed autonomously before I saw and felt it, and which continues to exist when I leave.  What I depend on is the separateness of wilderness.

    For me the magic of the landscape is that it is actually a parallel world to that of humankind.  I am delighted when I find a place that is perfect in its wholeness, clearly a world apart, that requires nothing of me, and that offers me nothing but a vision of its self-sufficiency.  I don’t want to be merely in a place that exists outside and beyond me, I want to become that place.

    The act of painting unites me with a wilderness that I recognize within myself.  When I am not painting, I feel disoriented, not knowing where I really am.  Putting paint onto the canvas is where I find my bearings, at the intersection of the image and the brush.  A glimpse of landscape becomes a structure on which to put paint, and that place becomes submerged in the process of painting.  Place and paint merge in a synthesis that is something new, apart from that which I originally encountered.  A painting emerges from my meeting with it, and the place itself floats back away into the wilderness.