My purpose as an artist is to create art to inspire the Soul.

I love nature - its a great inspiration for me because its there that I feel I can touch what is divine in our own nature, what is divine in life, and I hope that a little bit of that goes into my paintings.

I paint with soft pastels because they have very vibrant colors and are immediate. I work very quickly – I finish a painting in a couple of sessions because I’m trying to capture the light – in the tradition of the impressionists.

I like to paint places that I feel haunted by – it could be national park or a windswept bay in a remote part of Hawaii. When I paint, I’m trying to capture the way the light works, and the movement of energy – the stillness and the wildness and all of the in-between experiences that nature contains.

I’ve always loved color and so you will see a lot of it in my paintings. One of my favorite places to paint is the island of Maui because it has such strong colors. When you look at the ocean there its not just blue - it has deep purple and light purple along the surface, and the colors change during the day. It’s an otherworldly feeling – like you’re watching a saturated video of real life.

As I paint, I first of all make a decision about the composition and the framing and then I set down my base colors – I look for the darkest dark and the lightest light and where I want the viewer’s attention to be. After I’ve made those decisions, I start laying in the foundation colors as solid blocks. I often work with complimentary color - the underlying hints of color that you see when you look at something – light and color revealing form.

My major influences are the French impressionists and post-impressionists who made huge innovations in color and light that have influenced us ever since. I am very excited by those periods in time when a group of people came together and through their interaction brought in something new – some new way of seeing, some new way of understanding our connection to life.

I’m also inspired by paintings that capture a whole world or experience – so that someone can look at your work and though they may never have been to that place, they get a sense of being there. People who’ve never been to Maui, or never been to Santa Fe, or never been to the Great Ocean Road in Australia can have that feeling just by looking at one of my paintings.