Galleries The Artist     Artist Statement     Bio     Artist At Work Commissions Contact I am a plein air painter*. I have traveled with the paintbox in Greece, France, Spain, Italy, Britain, and along the Maine coast, working outdoors and from balconies and windows. I am interested in the character of place and the surprises of color and light on landscape and water. I try to make portraits of specific moments and to include just enough to tell the tale. In the long run, it’s about the paint.      * The term “plein air”, (in the open air) or “painting from life”, comes from 19th-century Europe, and refers to the belief that artists should work out of doors to understand and then convey the entire experience of a place with paint. In the mid-19th century, a revolution in France took this notion to new heights. Lead by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edouard Degas, Auguste Renoir, et. al., the impressionists espoused the belief that you should trust your eyes. Using newly developed theories of how the eye physically registers color, they maintained that what you saw in nature was not just form, but rather light on form. And light could be conveyed by color. To prove their theories, they took their paint tubes and easels outdoors, where they re-created the world as colors which suggested light. Rebuffed at first for what appeared to be unfinished paintings, the impressionist vision soon became a standard for truthfully conveying the outdoor experience.