My painting is based in the landscape tradition but I am not interested in recreating specifics of place. I paint in fine layers of oil on stainless steel and the results, both serene and luminous, blur the boundary between abstraction and representation. No matter how minimalist or abstract, these works suggest landscape in which the viewer may find sanctuary from the frenetic rigors of the mechanized world. This is the role given nature by the Romantics in response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the ravages of the Industrial Revolution.

But the Romantic idea of nature is not nature. Like industry, it is a product of the human mind. Being so, it is neither more nor less natural than the smoke stack which blights the horizon. This understanding forces me to acknowledge, first, that my yearning for sanctuary is nostalgia for a paradise which exists nowhere outside the Romantic imagination, and second, it may be argued that industry is itself natural in that man is of nature, and industry is of man.

As I paint, I combine references to nature with reference to industry. Screws may frame a vast sky. Paint may be pitted and scoured as if the depicted terrain has issued from dire industrial processes. Suggesting both Arcadian idyll and post-apocalyptic barren, these paintings dwell, as I am forced to myself, in limbo, yearning for one yet unable to deny the other.

Finally, I juxtapose nature and industry with man himself. By finishing the paintings with a glossy coat, I provide viewers with images, not just of sanctuary or of ruin, but also with images of themselves. Entering this limbo through their own reflections, they may engage it on their own terms.