Statement

My paintings are about time.

Time lost.

Fear and memory.

Grasping for moments that have since passed.

Moments when light glittered a little bit more, the sky was a little more blue, each breath a little bit fuller. My Tokyo paintings are attempts at holding on to delicate instants of my painfully short existence when I felt most alive and when I felt most connected to those who no longer are.

I don’t paint these places because they are pretty or fascinating. I paint them because they are my life. They are the places I have experienced, that I have a bond with that cannot be severed. These are the places I’ve spent the most precious time of my life with my wife, where her mother was born, where her great grandparents walked, the very places my grandfather walked as a young man.

Each painting is a desperate effort to hold on to what is already gone. The paintings are about time vanished forever. They are not about being expressive, nor are they are about “photorealism” or versimilitude. They are not concerned with the patterns of art history or art‘s future. They are only about memory and honoring that faithfully. My dedication to painting with such accuracy and detail is the only way I can imagine to accomplish that. I endeavor to fill each painting with as much sense of authenticity as possible, so both when I’m engaged in the process of it’s creation or looking at the completed work, I am held in those moments as long as I can be. The title, 100 Views of Tokyo is just a nod of gratitude to those great artists before me who have so beautifully rendered their own moments here. My own hope is that my work will someday be regarded in such a way, whether it is my paintings of Tokyo, Amish communities or the mountains. The source and the intent always remains the same.

Whenever I take my final, fading breath of this world, I will know my life’s work as a painter has left a trail of what I treasured most.