Artist Statement

My interest in painting is a merging of my passions for architecture and fine art. While architecture is a precise, technical art in which I design places to be experienced by many over the years, painting is a ‘time stamp’ capturing my personal encounter with a place at a unique moment. And watercolor is the perfect medium for me to integrate the unique aspects of both. My formal education in architecture, a training in keen observation and graphic communication, has influenced my painted works as they are carefully composed and anchored by realism. Painting, as a more forgiving medium of expression, frees my imagination, allowing for happy accident and charm to influence the finished product. This balance of the arts motivates me, and has resulted in the transition of painting from hobby to art.

The subjects of my work have been varied to date. Most recently my work is inspired by urban environments, both busy streetscapes and smaller, even quaint, settings I discover within the urban fabric, and the people who inhabit them. Intrigued by the drama created by light, I articulate this in my painting, as I explore the colors and textures that qualify these subjects. I work consciously but not heavily, using deliberate brushstrokes to create both suggestive washes and detailed highlights. Watercolor has enabled me to catch a setting ‘in the field’, as well as in a quiet, controlled space of a studio, where memories of place and all my senses affected there, run from mind, to hand, to brush. I use the challenging techniques required by this medium to create images which are all at once gentle, subtle, and transparent, as well as bold, rich, and striking.