I have spent several years drawing trees from observation, studying how their branches twist and turn, reach and retreat, linger… My new paintings are of trees painted from my imagination. A line becomes a branch, then a line again; it spurts, stops, twists, and then breaks. The limbs are sometimes graceful. Other times they are awkward, coarse, entangled gestures. Tension exists in reading the marks as both nature-based and pure abstraction.

The trees are painted in oil on translucent vellum stretched over a mirror, creating a subtle luminous quality and three-dimensional effect. I try to capture the sublime quality of the Hudson River Luminists, as well as the sense of limitless space in twelfth-century Chinese Southern Sung landscapes. Within my paintings there are no cultural references; I aim to reflect the timelessness of nature in a fleeting moment.