Portfolio of Works

The paintings in the Woodland Rhythms exhibit are part of my Forest Rhapsody series. The idea for the series arrived after I'd spent a few years painting plein-air in the forest around my home in Halfmoon Bay.

My practice starts with small studies painted directly in nature. Back in the studio I scale up and work solely from memory — never from the outdoor studies, never from photographs. I find it interesting how memories of my time in the forest coalesce on the canvas.

Each of these paintings holds twenty to thirty-plus layers of oil and cold wax medium. I compressed the layers and used mark-making to build depth and texture, both visual and physical, the way I saw it in the forest itself. My love and familiarity with our woods on the Coast guided each painting. I felt I was in steady communication with the surface, as if the work were directing my hand. At some point, after many layers, the right image would appear — as if it had risen up through them — and I knew the painting was finished.

The name “Forest Rhapsody” came to me one day while I was walking in the woods. I'd gone in feeling somber, and within a short time my mood had shifted. I felt light and happy, and — this may sound silly — I started singing. That's when the word rhapsody arrived. It's a shift I've felt many times among these trees. My hope is that these paintings stir a memory of someone's own time in the forest, and bring a little of that feeling back with them.

These paintings are dedicated to the memory of my aunt, Elizabeth Bennett, a long-time resident of the Sunshine Coast, a lifelong naturalist, and an early and persistent voice about the harm chemicals were doing — to our forests, our oceans, and our own bodies. She never saw those as separate things.

An essential part of my practice is direct painting.

When I paint outdoors, I am totally immersed in the painting and the subject, along with the experience of being in that exact place in time and space. I enjoy painting from a live reference and compared to my abstract studio work, I paint representationally.  There is a short window of time due to fleeting lighting conditions that makes the entire experience challenging, sometimes frustrating but regardless, I’m always ready  to head out into nature and do it all over again.   And my outdoor work inspires my larger scale abstract works in the studio. I don’t paint from any references when I’m in my studio, I rely on my memory bank of images from my outdoor studies. Specifically, I am interested in how my memory recalls and abstracts the images I have painted or photographed in nature. Mother Nature, a most wonderful but formidable teacher!

Photography has been my constant since I was a teen. I idolized Ansel Adams and learned the zone system early on. Although I do shoot in colour,  I prefer black and white photography. To my eye, black and white images can communicate a thought, a feeling, a memory on a completely different level, maybe more nostalgic, but I think also at times more mysterious.