Artist's statement: Painting in Beauce, France

 

I traveled to the Beauce region of France looking for parallels between the patinaed urban clusters of city rowhomes and the simple geometry of the farmsteads and villages of Beauce. Beauce is a deeply rural region, the flat landscape dotted with villages and isolated clusters of farmhouses like islands in a sea of fields.

The November sun rarely shone more than a feeble light while I was painting there. It was a constant and unchanging light perfect for unhurried study, careful drawing, and a focus on details that I would typically pass over on a bright sunny day when the shadows quickly shift and the sun races across the sky to evening. The atmosphere was moody and meditative, and a quiet sense of timelessness is reflected in this body of work.   

 

 

Artist statement from the exhibition "Places I Know" 

This group of urban landscape paintings is a documentation of my everyday environment and, in a larger sense, a historical record of what remains of Philadelphia's industrial past. The act of painting is a moment of meditation. I look for beauty in a landscape that is by turns harsh and neglected as well as radiant and poignant with the record of the generations of lives that have shaped the city. As I sit quietly painting, immersed in color and light, just beyond my consciousness violence and desperation run like an underground river. 

I am connected to nature even as I sit completely surrounded by this built environment. In the bricks, asphalt and cement I see the minerals from the earth that build and give color to the city -the ochre, iron oxides, calcium carbonate- and make up my palette. The world I live in is both hard and soft. Sharp edges are dulled with use and neglect, and raw colors are muted and made complex with the indescribable patina of dirt and age. As an inhabitant I participate in the evolution of this city. As a painter, I try to preserve the ephemeral and elusive beauty of THIS moment in the long history of THIS place.