My years as a portrait painter and studio painter and then as a plein air painter have given me the experience and skills to paint “things”. And often these things had narratives that I could use to evoke an emotion that I could share with the viewer. In recent years, however, I have returned more and more to the studio where I could explore the paints and surfaces and experiment with new painting techniques and tools. My recent body of work is more about memory, imagination and emotion. As Thomas Cole the famous Hudson River landscape artist said “If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.” In my studio, I have the luxury of time to “draw a veil over the common details, the unessential parts which shall leave the great features, whether the beautiful or the sublime dominant in the mind.” (Thomas Cole to Asher B. Durand, 1838)