As a native Wisconsinite, our forests and lakes are an important part of my soul. Forests reveal cycles of time and nature which emerge in my paintings and drawings coded as rhythmic patterns of line, negative space, color, and texture.

Every forest is different, and ever changing. Phases of life can be seen everywhere from the slender saplings and immense mature trees, to the diseased and fallen. In the quiet pools within the forests, ripples from insects, animals, and drizzling rain interact and disappear -- ephemeral events.

Immersed in a forest, lost in the luscious whorls of lichen, I remember that lichen can be a sign of clean air, or a weakening tree. The rhythmic contrasts of narrow and wide trunks, vertical, diagonal, or horizontal, narrate the history of the forest from the elders to the saplings. I feel the bodies of the trees dwarf and engulf me making me part of the forest, for the moment. Peering at ripples on a pond, I wonder about the disturbances above and below. The chaos and tumult of modern human life melts away for a little while and I am in a timeless zone.

Surface and color are important in my paintings where I develop relief surfaces to enhance the play of light and color like nature’s textures. I work in a wide range of sizes and formats from intimate oval paintings on birch panel to very large paintings on unstretched canvas and ten foot long scroll drawings on archival Tyvek. I like the intimacy of small works invite exploration of the surface while huge works engulf and surround us like wilderness.