I had intellectual parents who took mysticism seriously. My own first experiences of the mystical were as a child when alone in nature. Our family attended Quaker meetings. Quakers are concerned with being still and going inside to wait for The Light. Now I can see that my life as a painter has been looking for that Light. I hope when people look at my work they experience a place of internal stillness. The unique quality of attention that both the artistic & meditative process share is the slowing down and peering into the nature of an instant, each reminding us how compelling this kind of awareness can be.
Left-brain sequencing and language are so foreign to me that I seek and process large amounts of visual input to understand where I fit in the larger picture. Success has never been a part of my agenda; though being a part of the community of fellow artists where I live is important to me. I feel strongly that I am not a landscape painter; in fact, the work I revel in is often very different from my own Martin Puryear, Mark Rothko, Leon Golub, Kerry James Marshall, James Turrell, and Bill Viola.
There's a long lineage of landscape painting going back a thousand years, both in the East and the West. There's also a long lineage of the spiritual in landscape art. I have always felt a spiritual connection with nature.
Landscapes are usually idealized, in one way or another. What I'm doing is different, it's an imaginary landscape. Not an abstraction of an actual landscape, but the generation of one that previously didn't exist. Painting something that's not there until I paint it.
I don't just make up the imaginary landscape. It evolves in a process of interaction. From early in the process, it's an interactive dialog. As soon as I make a few marks, I have to take those marks into consideration. I'm not so much a director as a mediator, a facilitator. It's a slow evolutionary process, with color being the principal driver.
Early in the process, my grounding in abstract expressionism comes into play in supporting the emergence of this imaginary place. The painting is abstract in the sense that I'm solving the same problems an abstract painter solves, using the same methods and tools.
Using the Japanese papers has significantly altered this whole interactive process. Compared to painting on say, a wood panel, the figures on the Japanese paper assert their independence much earlier and much more forcefully. I'm less in charge, they're more intransigent.
Why do I do this work? The first answer always has to be that I do it because it's what I can do. It's my practice. I'm in this for spiritual reasons, and painting is my practice.