I am primarily a landscape painter. I work directly from nature--en plein air. I look at a specific landscape, establish its locale, the time of day, the quality of light, and paint it. Becoming involved with its particularities, I get to know it as if I were painting a figure or a still life. During the process, I am always creating and destroying until I arrive at the inevitability of this particular landscape. Art history has always played an important role in my work. Having absorbed the structural lessons of Cezanne and the "push-pull" principle of Hans Hoffman, I try to loosen the form and let color determine the structure and create the space. I strive for a visual back and forth in the space resulting from forms and colors reacting to each other - like music. Cezanne once said, "Painting from nature is not copying the object, but realizing ones sensations." When I paint the landscape, I feel like singing.