Artist’s Statement

“The function of the artist is to express reality as felt. In saying this, we must remember that ideas modify feelings. … By feeling is meant the response of the “body-and-mind” as a whole to the events of reality…” Robert Motherwell, The Modern Painter’s World.

Five hydrangea trees stand in the side yard of my family’s homestead in Little Compton, Rhode Island. This home and farmland sits on the ocean and is a landscape enmeshed in my sense of being. It provides a profound sense of place that I come to again and again to seek understanding.

These paintings contain semi-abstract images inspired by those trees. The motifs contained in the work are branches, blossoms, and leaves, and are central to the empirical and emotional realm of my life, a realm encompassing not only a sense of place but also one of history, abundance, loss, and the cyclical rhythm of the seasons. While the goal is to stay close to hydrangeas as a motif, my experimentation with mark-making and how the paint gets applied is particularly important. My aim is to organize the “sense of air”, structure, weight, surface, space, and light within the motif. I am interested in how the sense or spirit of the hydrangea can be expressed, not so much literally, but rather lyrically and poetically.

The paintings are conveyances, a term that refers to the support structure of the canvas, the materiality of the paint, and the transformation of paint that expresses meaning. This emphasis on the physicality of medium as subject, and as a means for content, is out of the Modernist philosophy and is one that informs my work.

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