I paint for these reasons: to answer the question of whether or not it is possible to create a thing, to know the world in a different way and therefore make meaning out of it, and to capture a fugitive moment. Paint is the material that represents the world outside myself. I am trying to find a way to reconcile the physical struggle with paint to a narrative impulse to represent the personal. Through working with observed imagery, all of my senses, and some other mysterious element, perhaps called memory, I am trying to create believable worlds on the canvas. Painting will bother me for the rest of my life.

Landscape, more than any other form of painting, urgently reinforces my sense of time passing. The fleeting nature of nature, of weather conditions, light conditions, foliage, and even human interactions with the landscape, all function in a continuum of change, which is at once inspiring and annoying beyond belief. The trick is that no day is ever offered up in exactly the same way twice. It is in these subtle shifts of daily existence that I am interested.

As a child I tried to hold onto things by remembering their appearance. The mystery of looking was central and the most mundane things were strange and beautiful. My earliest memories are of headlight beams moving across the bedroom walls at night, ominous shadows in the corners of rooms, complete blackness under the bed, wells of darkness in a creaking old house, sudden light dust beams on cold floor boards, ramshackle leaning houses. I remember patterns in tile bathroom floors, water damage cracks on the ceiling, tree bark, hillocks and canyons of bed blankets, shapes in windblown tree branches, ice fields on windowpanes, icicles under my father's nose, newts under rocks, insides of flowers, leaves floating on water, light peeling and dappled on the backs of my eyelids, the shape of my own arm, tattered trash bags in trees, alleyways of shattered glass, cigarettes obscenely piled in ashtrays, red stained, long car rides across prairies most definitely flat and passing telephone poles so fast they were fence-like.

My mother is from a small hilly town in West Virginia. My father is from a small flat town in Illinois. The hills of West Virginia are soft, rolling, mysterious and bountiful. The flatlands of Illinois are spare, stripped, angular, spacious and unforgiving. My mother is from a place where people tell stories. My father is from a place where they hardly speak. I am from a place in between.