Artist's Statement

I am a southern painter. I love this land, it’s people, it’s sundowns, and it’s sunups. I love the way the telephone lines carry drawn out words into the crimson skies, draping pole to pole down an endless single lane road. This place sings to my heart and soul. There is magic about it. The summers here are oppressive yet captivating. There are no big skies of the west or thick fronts of the northeast. Southern summer skies are intense and quick-tempered. Evenings produce a calm eeriness that beguiles the wet sweltering heat of the day only punctuated by a stray bat or effervescent lightning bugs illuminating a dark forest.

Blue-gray haze and intense summer heat inspire my artwork along with a swarm of noseeums over a field of hay.  The deafening shrill of the cicadas on a breezeless summer morning awakens my senses and it is a love of place as well as an impact of a moment that I wish convey. 

I am intrigued by Kudzu, non-native as it may be, and it’s integral part of the southern landscape. Primordial and aggressive, Kudzu does not care what has been placed in front of it. Blanketing trees, telephone poles, stumps and oneself if you stood still long enough. It provides an almost alien landscape of mythical hoodoos.

Abandonment fascinates me: farmhouses left to decay or are reclaimed by the land itself in the middle of a plowed field. Maybe this is a nod to my Scottish ancestors who traversed these hills and fields to settle in the Georgia piedmont. Abandoned farmhouses speak to me. Who lived there? Why do the current inhabitants leave them to stand? Why do they gracefully plow fields around them, sealing off any hint of a drive or entrance with tobacco or cotton creating sentinels of the  south and testaments to lives lived long ago.

I form a connectedness to place with this evidence of the people who worked the land. This is the south that exists on that teary place behind your eyes and reaches down into your chest. I round the corner onto my street. Houses sleep in a blue twilight haze. Steam rises from the asphalt. Wisteria creeps along power lines, and I am home.