I began painting in watercolors nearly thirty years ago, in part to understand why I found myself increasingly attracted to watercolors over other media when visiting a museum or gallery. Having no formal studio art education, I took watercolor and drawing classes at the Arlington (MA) Center for the Arts and the Concord Art Association and in the intervening years have attended numerous painting workshops in the greater Boston area, Maine, California, Scotland, England, and Italy.

I am temperamentally drawn to certain aspects of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, specifically its focus on finding beauty in the natural cycle of growth and decay. I tend to paint old buildings, ruins, weathered boats, or other man-made objects whose worn and textured surfaces suggest time’s passage. When painting a landscape, I often include an architectural or other man-made element alluding to human presence and the notion of time.

For me, the challenge of watercolor painting is to convincingly render the motif without losing the medium’s characteristic luminosity, transparency, and freshness.