Artist Statement

I am most interested in expressing an emotional response to the physicality of space in the landscapes that resonate with me. A recurring image that catches my eye as I travel through our region is the shape of fields against the sky and how they fall away from wooded hilltops. I want to go deeper in exploring the meaning of that image than just a realistic or impressionistic depiction of the discovered landscape. Moving toward abstraction offers me the ability to convey where my intuition is leading.

I have spent over 30 years helping other artists and creatives in their pursuit of artistic success, curating their work, offering exhibits, and encouraging them in the value of what they do in these rural settings. 

After a health crisis in 2022, I began to focus on my own work. We do not stop needing to create at any age. Despite the difficulties of the world, the limiting voices in our head, making art is an act of faith.

It is that act of creating, I believe, that makes it possible for the artist and the viewer of the arts alike, to keep going while facing life’s difficulties, and to experience relief and joy even then. Considering that, I am now choosing to deepen my practice.

An important help to me in my artistic development and ability to get to this point has been the support and vision of the Tioga Arts Council. In addition to holding programs and events that support visual artists, they created studio spaces at an affordable rate on the second floor of their building. They are safe, professional place in which to create work. I have benefited from being in the proximity and support of the downtown artistic community.

There are very few spaces like this. In this small town it is unique. To have a solo exhibit in the Tioga Arts Council’s gallery space is a significant opportunity as an artist in our area. All art is local. This community in rural Tioga County is the place for my art.

This body of work is intended to share my response to the landscapes of my life and invite the viewer to feel the physicality of the emotional language of color and space in the two-dimensional landscape. I am drawn into abstraction in painting, whether oils or acrylics, because it allows me to express more accurately my emotional responses to the landscapes I have inhabited, moved through, or visited throughout my life.

What lights me up, what I find so beautiful and need to express on the surface of canvas or board, are not-the details of the world in an orderly fashion, but the amazing shapes of fields, the revelation of the hills without leaves in winter, the feeling of the air across a northern lake.

In the rural Southern Tier of New York State, many visual artists beautifully depict landscapes in a realistic or impressionistic style. Fewer artists here use a purely abstract approach which excels in the power of color and form to invoke emotional response but loses the reference to the landscape. I am exploring the neglected places in between as a viable approach to representing nature and offering the community another way to appreciate the rural landscape.