About Me

I live in northwest New Jersey and paint rivers and mountains, sometimes close to home and sometimes hours away. Most of my work starts on Google Earth or comes from a spot I stumbled into on some earlier trip, somewhere that stuck in my head and wouldn't leave. From there it's a drive, anywhere from thirty minutes to multiple hours, and then either a setup right by the car or a hike in if the view earns it.

I paint landscapes because the land is sacred to me. Some people have religion. I have nature. I'm watching the world come apart under climate change and the system driving it. The wild places that are still here feel like the most honest thing left to point a brush at. Untouched, indifferent to us, holding their own light and weather. I'll paint a city or a barn now and then, but the raw land is what pulls me back.

What I'm chasing out there is color and value. More than composition, more than subject. The actual colors hitting my eyes when I look out at the world. Oil is the only medium that lets me mix the richness I'm seeing and build the texture nature already has. Every painting is an attempt to get closer to what's really in front of me.

The observation thing started early. I lived in Vienna in middle school and it was the first time I understood how big the world is. How many cities, how many lives, how small I was inside all of it. That feeling never left. I came back understanding, even if I couldn't have said it then, that being able to stand somewhere and really look was something I didn't want to lose.

I tried art school after high school. I went to RISD for animation and lasted a year. The fundamentals were valuable but I was depressed and school had never worked for me, and I left without a plan. Landscape painting is what I found on the other side of that. Going out into the woods with a panel and oils is what pulled me back into the world. It still does.

People who own my work tell me it's the painting they end up looking at the most in their house. That's the highest thing anyone has ever said to me about what I do.