These paintings come into being through a process of layering, destruction and rebuilding, bringing the painting surface to a requisite complexity, though hopefully maintaining an appearance of ease. It is a process of areas painted, painted out, paintings rotated, paintings abandoned, then recovered . . . over periods of weeks or years, bringing that surface into a balance that breathes resolution and completion. It is a journey of multiple intangibles, where the painter searches to work from the inner core of authenticity and nobody else’s opinions, and to learn from the doubt that inevitably coexists.

Before ever painting, twenty-five years of classical piano studies, with an emphasis on Beethoven and Schubert, filled my life with purpose beyond the work I did for financial livelihood. Somehow that musical experience seemed to morph into an affinity for the movement of paint. Painting become an extension of the music that had been so integral to the balance of my life, and in the early years of abstract painting I almost obsessively needed to be listening to those composers. Now, either silence or music can accompany the elixir of paint, but in the end the painting needs to have musical or lyrical qualities. At times, areas of a painting can evoke for me a particular refrain from a sonata; that confluence of classical sounds and twenty-first century visual art is a mystery, but a mystery I embrace as uniquely mine.