With a graduate degree in poetry, I taught college English and art history for several years before falling in love with American landscape painting and becoming a professional artist. Drawing on that background, my work begins in mood and emotion, encompassing Tonalism and extending to abstraction through a contemporary sensibility. I paint on site, en plein air and from life, to absorb sensations and a visual vocabulary of place that later in the studio I try to draw upon with greater freedom of expression. More than anything else, I aspire to be a brilliant composer. I see painting as a lens for exploring perception and viewing the world through feeling. Increasingly, my paintings seem to be about the tension created between looking and responding to the world – questions of perception, subjectivity, and representation. Yet it is always also about a state of mind – something purely non-rational and intuitive. Painting bounces between the thrill of the medium of paint, the challenge of responding authentically to the world and to the painting in progress, and mindfulness of the history and traditions of western art.