“My process usually begins when I spot something interesting to me in nature. We are lucky to live in Kentucky because interesting things in nature are all around us! I usually begin by capturing the inspiration in a photograph taken on my iPhone, which I carry with me at all times. This allows me to bring the inspiration into the studio, so that I can begin planning the adjacent painting. I first decide what I like about the photograph which I want to carry over to the painting. This allows for very precise color mixing. Then I choose something about the photograph which I want to make less real and more abstract in the actual painting. In my painting, “Hopper’s Country Store,” for instance, I wanted to make a Da Vinci-like background landscape and top it off with an electric blue sky. So, in that particular case, the objects in the foreground are fairly realistic all the way to the dust in the window in the middle ground. Then it gets progressively more abstract the deeper into the painting you go. In “Point at Barren River Lake” the abstractions are more subtle and predominantly limited to banding the sky like the water. Otherwise, it’s a photoreal painting. “River Bend” is somewhat in between. The upper half is nearly photoreal and the lower half is impressionistic. To keep versatile, I try to use a different style in every painting. I love playing with this theme of “where does the real become unreal?”
