I paint personal refuges, interior landscapes, moments - places to visit for solace and sanctuary, to be reminded of the value to the human spirit of wild creatures and wild places. My paintings explore nature not as an expendable resource but as a past home, once left and forgotten, now longed for and dreamlike. As the fragility of nature becomes more apparent, so does its value to us.

It is becoming ever clearer that the impulse that led us to tame, degrade and separate is resulting in increasingly precarious habitat for all living creatures - humans included.

I believe we have done this as a species based on the mistaken notion that our survival depended on it. We have touched and tended and tamed our world to such an extent that at times it seems that we have wrested the wild out of the wilderness. How do we deal with our strange duality as animal beings that are part of nature and rational beings that have separated from it? What does the concept of the 'natural' world signify? What is our place in the natural world at this point in time? How do wild creatures exist in the ever-constricting world remaining to them in the wake of our haunting success? My paintings explore the paradoxical relationship between human culture and the natural world. Who says that all must vanish? Who knows, perhaps the flight of the bird you wound remains, and perhaps flowers survive caresses in us, in their ground. I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

Ipaint creature