Some of our deepest emotions translate poorly into words. Eloquent as verbal tools can be, some aspect remains unsaid. We humans are often too quick to discard crucial feelings and memories and in so doing we diminish ourselves. Artists, through their work, restore vital missing pieces of puzzle. When we make art, these essential forgotten fragments of lives come back and tap us on the shoulder, refusing any longer to be ignored. It's a really good thing.

The exhibit's title, Ancient Earth/Future Sky, sums up a central theme of my paintings - nature, time, and timelessness. By the standards of the mountains and seas, we are small and our time here very short. In the granite of mountains and the bark of weathered trees we sense the earth's almost mysterious power to exist and endure far longer than ourselves.

Yet with the ceaselessly changing sky comes a reminder that nature, like ourselves, lives and changes too. Each day is not just a repeat of the last. The sky so often summons up our feelings for our future. There is a great mystery here in this unchanging and yet always changing aspect of the landscape and the heavens. It mirrors so well this delightful and yet contradictory experience of living our lives. It is the kind of idea I can express best in painting.

Many other artists before me I think have mused on these questions and through their paintings have influenced the work I do. Almost all the artists of 19th century America's Hudson River School intrigue me. Also later painters like George Inness and Winslow Homer. More recent still are the powerful paintings and prints of Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper.