Distillation: A Bit About My Process

I walk outdoors almost every day. Sometimes it’s in the semi-rural areas where I live, sometimes in the city or urban parks, sometimes on trails, or at the beach. Nature never disappoints.

As I’m walking I find I’m particularly open visually.

The rhythm and repetitiveness of the activity seems to create open space in your mind. I notice things.

Sometimes I take pictures, or make a quick sketch on my phone. 

This walk, this immersion, becomes my daily source of raw material and energy. 

I take those mental images or photos back to the studio and I live with them.

I draw them. I repeat them, and explore them, and re-iterate them in sketchbooks and painting studies, trying to express the moment of clarity that drew me to them originally. (As I’ve done this over the years, I notice how many times a similar pattern or motif will occur in different subjects.)

The process of exploring and re-iterating these subjects seems to embed them into my mental vocabulary. Once this happens, the motifs emerge almost unconsciously while I am working and are repeated in my prints and paintings.

When I move on to making my final works, I try to directly express my experience of being alive in the world.

I’m not trying to paint a picture of a particular scene, but neither am I relying solely on expressing my emotions, or exploring the materials, although both of these play a role.

Instead, I am using these abstracted impressions to make work that I hope creates a resonance in the viewer—that they recognize these motifs on a deep level and feel something of their own relationship with nature and with others as a part of it.

BTW, that last painting is part of a small group of tiny paintings that will drop into the shop on February 4th, so sign up for my list if you want first access.