"I endeavor to approach my work with, as jazz musician Stan Getz put it, 'an unpretentiousness, spontaneity, and poetry of honest emotion.' Plein-aire painting, to my mind, is ultimately about experience. It is a way for me to explore and savor the raw sensations of a given time and place, and allow myself to be guided by the spontaneous impressions I receive. It goes beyond just seeing a landscape as a picturesque subject -- it is a personal journey of discovery, through which I attempt to create paintings that carry within them the power and emotional content of my direct experiences.
I focus on pure landscapes because they intrigue me. I feel that landscape is so much more than just a backdrop for human affairs or wildlife. It has an intrinsic beauty and value that cannot be ignored or denied. A landscape painting carries an implicit sense of solitude and silent contemplation; an invitation, if you will, to the viewer, to step out of their world and lose themselves for a moment in the sublime beauty and grandeur of the natural world.
Whether working in the field or the studio, I strive to infuse my work with a quality that exceeds the mere appearance of my chosen subject. I seek to share with viewers not just what I found interesting, but why it interested me. It is my aspiration that my paintings, when they are successful, become glimpses beyond the surface of both subject and artist and into the essential nature of both."
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