My paintings address the issues of style, beauty and idealization by combining images that reference the romantic sublime of the 19th century and the 20th century’s utopian ideals of high modernism. I am interested in the relationship between romanticism and modernism, between the appeal of nature as disordered and architecture as an attempt to construct a rational space.

My most recent iconography has consisted of buildings such as Richard Meier’s Atheneum and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, which represent the modernist ideal combined with the broad, big sky associated with such Hudson River School painters as Frederick Church and Thomas Cole. On the level of metaphor the juxtaposition of these two seemingly disparate references alludes to the relationship of the sensuous body and the rational mind. Likewise the recent introduction of abstract non-representational elements along the bottom edge of the painting (more specifically elements of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings from the 1950’s “Blue” and “Red” series) constitutes the impulsive or intuitive within the predetermined field of contemporary painting. In combining these images I seek to establish the underlying visual terms of a post modernism, which is neither dependent on kitsch, nor the rejection of history.

Finally, the unreality and impossibility of the Hudson River School’s enhanced idealized nature and the simultaneous spatial implausibility of light, color, placement, perspective, and scale represent a place that is truly “nowhere” ---- an isolated place that one cannot get to. While this may appear to be an exercise in 21st century irony, the struggle played out in the “nowhere” -- which can only exist in the fiction/reality of painting--- represents our continued though inexplicable yearning for the sublimity promised by utopian ideals.