Artist Statement

This current cycle of painting is part of my attempt to represent aspects of these West Texas environs which by turns awe me with their hardscrabble beauty, and confound me with their primordial indifference to my attentions.

Light, as well as its lack, is what informs these scenes. Its ephemeral nature as it reflects off of, and sinks into this system of mist, rock and vegetation, causes me to consider the fleeting as well as the persistant. Order and disorder coexist in these works. I call the landscapes in this show Tracts, a word that can mean an undefined area of land, as well as the opposite.

Painting is about the tension between the subject and the medium. As the instigator and go-between in this enterprise, I employ whatever technique that a given perception requires. This affords me maximal absorbtion in the composition of the piece.