About Me

Artist Statement

I’ve long been intrigued by the way images pull us in and hold us without our knowing why, a visual experience beyond verbalization. It is not something I seek to understand but is instead what I work from and strive for in my painting. I paint abstracts because they require me to make my way by instinct and offer the purest form for achieving visual communion without words, symbols, or meaning. I also paint cityscapes and landscapes through a lens of abstraction in order to see beyond the scene to the underlying arrangement of shapes, colors, and lines which is what I’m intuitively and truly after. My goal is to create works that can connect with a viewer through a shared language neither of us can speak.

Background

I am a painter who lives in Washington, DC. I grew up in a small town in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania and moved to DC in 1983 to attend George Washington University. At GWU, I majored in political science but took a number of drawing and painting courses before and after graduation in 1987. I have painted mountain and wooded scenes from my hometown of Stroudsburg, DC city and alley scenes, and abstracts. I work primarily in oil but also acrylic. During this time, I served as a specialist in accessibility for people with disabilities at the U.S. Access Board, a federal agency. In 2022, I retired from federal service after a 36-year career and resumed my focus on painting, particularly local scenes in my DC neighborhood of Shaw.