My Process and Style
Every painting I make begins with a place that stopped me.
I photograph constantly... coastlines, trails, city streets at night, rust and peeling paint, the geometry of things most people walk past. When an image has the right charge, I know. There's a quality of light, or a tension in the composition, or a mood I can feel before I can name it. Those are the images I paint from.
I don't paint what I see. I paint what I felt when I saw it. On the way to the panel I strip out detail until what's left is the shapes, colors and contrasts that carried the feeling.
The medium
I work in oil and cold wax on wood panel. I mix Gamblin oil paint with Gamblin cold wax medium at roughly equal parts, which gives the paint a stiff, buttery body that holds every mark I make. The surface comes out matte and luminous, with a depth that seems to come from inside the paint rather than sitting on top of it.
Panel is the only surface that makes sense for this work. It's rigid enough to take the pressure of knives and scrapers without flexing, and strong enough to carry the weight of thick paint for decades.
Building up and carving back
My work lives between two opposite moves. I add paint, and I take it away.
The additive side is impasto: paint laid on thick with palette knives, until the ridges cast their own shadows. Those ridges change with the light in the room. A painting in morning light and the same painting in the afternoon are not quite the same painting.
The subtractive side is sgraffito, from the Italian for "scratched." I cut back into the paint with the edge of a knife, the back of a brush, a scraper or steel wool, and reveal what's underneath. Every lupine stalk in A Tide of Lupines is a line I scratched out with the brush handle. The piers in Monterey Bay Wharf are carved into the dark water.
I've loved both moves since my very first paintings, and my newest work leans further into the carving: dark grounds cut back to light, lines as fine as an engraving. The best moments happen where the two meet. A thick ridge of paint beside a hairline scratch. Loud beside quiet. My work explores the range and balance of the two.
Color and value
My color runs the full range. Some paintings are saturated and pushed past realism (the blue of the lupines, the orange of the poppies). Others are nearly monochrome. Dark Solitude, Natural Bridges is built almost entirely from cool darks, one black rock against the surf.
What holds it all together is value, the range from light to dark. Whether the palette is loud or quiet, the light has to read first. I'm not documenting light... I'm amplifying it.
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