My many years of design-related activity have had a strong impact on my work as a painter. Accordingly, I'm always looking for ways to distill the formal compositional elements of a painting necessary to express a central concept.

My most fundamental influence has been ancient Chinese painting-its depiction of time and space, expression of duality, and its marvelous iconography of human and nature. I'm indebted to early modernists of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Cezanne, Bonnard, Mondrian, Morandi, and Matisse, to name a few. Later American influences from mid to late 20th century include Milton Avery, Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn. Current artists who inspire me include Sean Scully, Gerhard Richter, and Chuck Close.

In my current body of work, I not only continue my formal study of space, form, and color within the classical genre of landscape, but am also moving into new territory as I continue to distill and interpret the world I inhabit in new ways.

Collectors who know my older work will hopefully find my current work both familiar and new: familiar in terms of the textural quality of the surface, treatment of edges, strong horizontals, and luminosity. And new as the familiar forms of the barn, for example, are fractured in new ways and sometimes disappear altogether when I move into the nonrepresentational realm.

While oil has historically been my medium, one of the directions in which I continue to explore the notion of duality has been to begin works with acrylic and ink. This has brought a new energy and spontaneity to my process that reflects my love of ancient Chinese painting and the beauty of the calligraphic line. Until 2008, I never used black, following the impressionist dictate to use only primaries. But with ink and acrylic, I've been exploring that color and it's undeniable power.

The works attempt to bring the viewer along as a participant in the drama of process, as the work reveals itself at each stage and takes on new meaning and complexity, introducing time and narrative. Accordingly, what the final image looks like is more the outcome of the process, with each step along the way informed and influenced by the preceding one.

Each stage offers a completion and resolution of sorts, so really there is only process, and at some point in it's evolution, work stops. The structured, thought out process appeals to me as an architect, and the spontaneous action and results appeal to me as a metaphor of our individual journeys through life.