Though I have moved during various stages between abstraction and representation, all my paintings are naturalistic. They are all done from direct observation in the landscape, of still-life installations in the studio or, in the case of the larger, “abstract” tree paintings and figurative work, from a constantly replenished body of drawings done from direct observation.

Despite their apparent dissimilarity, all of my paintings have several concerns in common. They are all at some level about the mundane beauty of the perceived world - the cool reflected light on a cluster of changing leaves before the warm glow of an autumnal landscape; light on silver-gray, leafless branches, a rumpled sheet, a concrete block, illuminating the dusty accumulation on the rusted clutter of my studio.

But my paintings are equally intent on exploring fundamental disjunction between perception and the flat, inert abstraction of the picture plane. All paintings are visual arguments about the necessity of the metaphorical function of an abstract vocabulary to achieve reference or illusion and the importance of the formal elements of painting as distinct from perceived experience. Though the medium suffers from severe limitations these very limitations give the material a propensity to make itself evident.

Shapes develop their own interactions and expectations. Forms, while fixed solidly in paint, suggest some internal volition to move or change. In this awkwardness and peculiarity is the potential to make something that won’t do what is expected of it. It will have something of the beauty and inscrutability of the world we perceive. It will become a new entity in the world.

Perhaps that is the meaning of painting. It is made of stuff, but this stuff has the power to transfigure. By drawing the abstract into such a close, tenuous relationship with depiction I am trying to ask this central question. How does it transfigure, at what mysterious intersection of material and idea, and what can it mean, where can I go with it? The enduring surprise and poignancy of a good painting is that when I return to the studio it is still frozen in the same struggle, manifesting the same assertion, the same restless doubt.