News and Exhibitions
Current:
Arcadia, solo exhibition May 4th - June 10th 2023 at Ellio Fine Art, Houston, TX Ellio Fine Art
In poetry and the visual arts, Arcadia is an evolving idea rooted in the concept of a mythical, idyllic place: unspoiled, elemental, and beautiful. Literally, it refers to the landscape in Acadia National Park, Maine, the name Acadia having mutated from its 16th-century designation of Arcadia.
Seal Cove, Maine, adjacent to Acadia National Park, is a place I have visited and experienced since childhood - it is a landscape that I draw on for inspiration both in real-time and as a touchstone in my memory. It is that "mythical idyllic place" where I experience an intense sense of beauty, but also a bittersweet quality - a longing for the paradise of childhood and childhood perception: pure engagement, rapt attention, a seeing of things for the first time. My color sensibility, sense of light and space, and sense of beauty and abstraction are informed by my relationship to this place. Acadia is a kind of inner Arcadia - a muse and home of my heart.
With my paintings, I hope to create for the viewer the experience that I have had - an awareness of vastness and beauty, but not without the darker side of longing and melancholy.