Although I started my career as a purely abstract painter, and I guess I still am an abstract painter, strictly speaking, somewhere along the line I started to feel the need to bring more referential elements into many of my paintings. One of the directions I’ve explored is in the tree paintings, but I moved out in several directions, including using language and diagrams, and in many pieces, flowers.

Let’s talk about flowers…

Nothing is static. Even mountains grow and erode. But for me, a flower is the perfect example of and metaphor for the transience of all things. At every moment a flower is either coming into being or passing its peak and moving toward dissolution. It is this non-static quality of flowers that I am always trying to capture, sometimes with a single stroke, and sometimes with dozens of layers of paint, sometimes as a wisp of color, and sometimes with crust and texture which has been repeatedly built up and broken down.

I love flowers, and I love painting flowers.