My own story of painting begins as a language forming in the layers of paint that are applied, dried and then reworked.  Painting and drawing are as much an offering as it is a compulsion to map, define, and translate; set in motion by liquid, viscous and earthy materials.  Within the cloaks of paint are found images that evoke a momentary glance upon the sea, built of mysteries in the tides and storms. The ever-moving surface of the ocean is in a constant cycle of change. As a painter, my attachment to image is not to be denied in relation to the meanings also found in the unfolding and moving history of the surface of the painting. The marks and drips reveal the capacity for the materials to speak both of itself and of the unknown.   

 

How is it that we ever navigate this world? Vessels and ships, even our bodies are held or lost by the great power of the sea waters, our rivers and bays. The psychological angst found in the terror and beauty of the wild and unpredictable nature of the ocean is explored in the series ‘I Dreamed I Was the River’.  This series concerns my ancestors’ route from the north of Scotland, shipped-wrecked along the coast of Portugal, before eventually crossing to the colonial shores of Maryland.  

 

Along the edge of the sea, I strive to uncover grace in the unknown. Although perhaps it is in love: the love of paint, of passages, of courage. My redemption, therefore, lies upon a veiled landscape as narrations of mystery, memory and what is often a monstrous desire for survival.

​

"On all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before; of the sea’s eternal rhythms — the tides, the beat of surf, the pressing rivers of the currents — shaping, changing, dominating; of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future."

-Rachel Carson