With landscape, my interest centers upon form, light and composition, with the particulars of the given locality of secondary importance. It is in landscape that I feel most "abstract": what drives the image is the array of shapes and how they occupy the picture plane, not whether a building happens to be in France or New Hampshire. Since architectural subject matter lends itself to the composing of forms within a space, I have over the years returned again and again to the same buildings and places to produce closely related images. In short, I consider that much of my landscape work is painting about painting.
In contrast, in my figure painting, form and composition remain important but my preoccupation is much more with content, sometimes narrative, sometimes the attempt to depict a state of mind. More specifically, I have in some of my figure work sought to show human goodness and to capture contexts and moments that reveal the interdependence of people in a contingent world. The images that ultimately arrive on the canvas can sometimes spend months in my head before evolving through very loose sketches to painted studies as my sense of what I am trying to express is revealed.
