My artwork has always been about calling attention to and celebrating the Spirit of Nature. Photography started out as a way for me to create landscape and seascape reference materials for paintings. This focus helped create a balance between city life in New York and the spiritual inspiration that nature provided me.
I like to make art about the dichotomy of our physical world and a more mysterious spiritual reality that, for me, speaks easily through nature, the landscape and the seascape.
As a painter who loves photography, some of my most recent works are mixed media pieces that incorporate manipulated Polaroid’s, acrylic paint and graphite. While the immediacy of instant photography is most appealing, I am often compelled to leave my tangible handmade mark by drawing and painting on the photographic prints.
Being from New Orleans, having lived in New York City, and now living in Los Angeles, the natural environs of each place have been the subject matter for my art. While in New York and living in Long Beach, it was the sea and rocky shore that became a focal point. The intense light, my grandfather’s stained glass windows, the swampy landscape and subtropical plants in Louisiana were a part of what inspired me there. Once I moved to California in 1999, it was the Pacific Ocean that worked it’s way into my art, as well as the trees that grow here.
My fascination with the way that trees in Los Angeles are often times very closely cropped has informed much of the current focus in my work. I see them as natural elements that are also man-made, and very figurative. Many urban trees survive, just as we do, and adapt to less than ideal circumstances. More often than not, they maintain their intrinsic beauty and live up to their innate responsibility: to sustain life. I honor these trees as totems rich with visual imagery and metamorphic meaning that harkens to a most profound condition: mutual survival of people and trees into a healthy future.
I return to Louisiana often, where the magic of the cypress swamp continues to inspire me. I recently curated and participated in the exhibition “Louisiana Trees: Life Entwined” at Sibley Gallery in New Orleans, which explored a theme dear to my heart: how people affect trees, how trees affect people. A companion exhibition on Los Angeles trees is in the works.