SENSING PLACE

Artist Statement

My work is rooted in portraits of place, with a strong focus on barns, old farmhouses, and other forgotten buildings. I’m drawn to the familiar shapes of the agrarian landscape, yet I try to show them in ways that feel a little mysterious too. For me, painting is a way of documenting—of paying attention to building forms, perspectives, and the land itself, while also reflecting my sense of responsibility to landscape stewardship.

I’ve always been inspired by American painters like Fairfield Porter, Richard Diebenkorn, Lois Dodd, and Edward Hopper. Their influence weaves through my practice as I search for that same balance of observation and abstraction. My approach to bold, color-field painting traces back to my studies with Adele Alsop at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where I learned to trust strong, confident brushwork.

When I look at the landscape, I often see it as a kind of covering—like wallpaper or a blanket—that drapes across everything. In my paintings, this becomes a way to explore themes of memory and time: decay and preservation, nostalgia, shifting light and shadow. Chairs sometimes appear in my work as stand-ins for people, hinting at presence even when no figures are shown. My technique is a mix of opposites—thick, textured paint layered on in some places, left thin and open in others—those “spaces between” matter just as much as what’s painted in.

I tend to work on several paintings at once, letting earlier shapes and gestures resurface in later layers. This creates a palimpsest effect, where traces of what came before remain visible-a painterly pentimento that feels natural to me. At times, I find myself chasing the moment when buildings seem to glow in full sunlight, radiant against the shifting sky. In those works, I feel closest to Hopper, capturing that fleeting pause when bright light cuts through cloud cover, a reminder that summer has finally arrived.