On View

I've been making art since I was four. As an adult I settled on landscapes, mostly, wide open spaces. Three years ago, losing my wife to cancer closed all of that down. When I came back to the studio, what came out wasn't landscape anymore. It was words — things I couldn't say, letters that would never be sent, written and rotated and painted over until they nearly disappeared into color and texture. That's how Letters to the Void began.

It didn't stay there. What started as private letters became a way of working — I hold a sentence in my head while I paint it, like a mantra, with my brush. Somewhere along the way I realized this wasn't just about grief, it became my path forward. Now I use it on whatever's going on in my life — self-doubt about the work itself, an old farmhouse full of uninvited guests, the particular ache of being an optimist who doesn't always get what he hoped for. Each canvas holds one of those and argues with itself: chaos against order, private against public. A background settles over the top last, like weather, and the words disappear underneath, mostly unreadable.

I don't really go back and read them. They already did their job. What's left is the form — color, texture, composition — a surface where the feeling can stay without needing to be explained. One piece in this show, “Words Are an Elixir,” is about that directly: not what the words say, but what the saying of them does.

You can read the letters if you want, or you can try anyway. But it's more about the act of creating than the letters themselves.