I majored in college in both ceramic studio art and biology. While continuing to experiment with various media, including performance art and sculpture, I went on to focus on marine and mathematical ecology. Finally, after two decades, I decided to make painting the center of my life. All these experiences, as well as my long-held passion for the New York School painters, are major influences on my work.

My studies involved the dispersion patterns of organisms in space, and, in my early work, I sought to reflect the rhythms of these patterns. Although my painting is resolutely non-representational, my inspiration initially often came from such sources as Neolithic standing stones (e.g. Stonehenge), old piers and pilings, and groups of figures in landscapes.

In recent years, my work has become both more gestural and more abstract. The interest in rhythms persists but is increasingly buried – an underlying structure that I hope the viewer will sense but not see, and I now use heightened color contrast to emphasize my paintings’ gestural aspects. My aspiration is to integrate gesture and color field – two approaches to abstract painting that are generally considered to be divergent.

These ambitions have led me to larger canvases with a wider, mural-like aspect, and I’ve come to think of the resulting paintings as visual narratives to be read by the outer and the inner eye.

I paint in layers in order to maintain the integrity of gestures and to create a certain depth, elusiveness, and complexity. The slow process of waiting for layers to dry dictates that I typically work on eight to twelve paintings at any one time. Although this stretches out the work on a given painting to many sessions, it also enables a kind of conversation, with each painting informing the progress of the others. I hope that echoes of this conversation will reach the viewer.