My paintings come from what I most intimately know and long for--the desert land my family owns in Southern Utah, where I grew up--my family relationships--memories of close friends in Guatemala, where my mother researched and my father was town doctor. The paintings are serene and overtly loving yet with undeniable angst, an awareness of brevity and an enchanted sense of doom. Much information is left out of the paintings, with biased attention holding onto particular details. They are ephemeral images in a process of either emerging, transforming or disappearing. The paintings suggest multiple places and events, both epic and everyday and dissolve into abstraction, speaking about fantasy as much as memory.

Although the paintings are personally loaded with mysterious emotions and stories attached, they also are reminiscent of historic romantic painting. They go back to the Hudson River School and expedition paintings and, in recent work, the bathers and leisure lunches painted by Monet, Manet, Gauguin and Seurat. At the same time they strike chords of Helen Frankenthaler and Milton Avery.

While my imagery appears distant in time and place, as if seen through a far away lens, the paintings carry a great physical intimacy, evidencing a process involving the entire body. To paint I sit or stand atop a platform with my canvas beneath me. In Place with No Name, I used rags to stain the canvas, which I bundled in my hand or swaddled around brooms and scrubbers. I stood above, sweeping, scrubbing and sanding away at the painting. In other recent work I used pastel on canvas which I rubbed into the grain with wet hands.