I discover what I'm painting as I paint.

I also claim influence from the Abstract Expressionists, where the very act of painting is what the painting is about.

My art education occurred in the midst of the 1980's "New Image Painting" and the inspiration of those Pluralists also inform my approach to art.

I continue to embrace the exploratory process and aim for further simplification, while deliberately relinquishing control to allow for accidents and, subsequently, a more intuitive and subconscious response to the paint, the composition, and the narrative.

Recurring imagery like ladders, boots, and floating figures are part of my symbolic vocabulary and creatures of my painting process. Ladders are both surrogates for the human presence and metaphors for climbing, escaping, and/or attaining alternative perspectives.

The army boots are symbols of masculinity. Cartoon-like in their bulkiness, large and clunky, they straddle and command space though the untied laces drape and dangle.

The floating figure represents anxiety and ambivalence, emotional states frequently present while I paint. A solitary figure deeply immersed in isolation. Contradictorily, it also signifies a sense of calmness, a quiet-dream-state, a place of patience and waiting.

To me, the act of painting is an investigation of being, of inhabiting one's body, of existing in and at the moment.

The writer Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to his son John, a painter, said that "the point of being an artist is that you may live." That, to paint, "is to make yourself alive." He closes the letter succinctly and, I feel, encouragingly, by saying, "you won't arrive. It is an endless search."

I, too, take his advice.