I am a contemporary painter who uses rigorous Old-Master techniques. Since childhood, I have been driven by an unyielding faith in the mysterious forces that allow me to enter my subjects. As such, I am not simply a painter in the “realist” school. I do not only show “things,” but the intangible inner form expressed in the subject’s tangible physical structure.

At present, I am working on a series of oils based on studies done on location in the Angeles National Forest. I began this series with 100 Roots, Angeles Forest (2006–07), a large oil landscape now in the collection of the Fisher Museum of Art at USC. The half-dozen works now in progress focus on the creek bed that grounds the ancient oak at the center of 100 Roots.

Although 100 Roots clearly evolved from my earlier work—and is still in keeping with my conviction that realism can offer a mode of transcendence—the very act of painting it answered the question "Why paint?" in a whole new way. During the year it took to make it, I entered into a call-and-response with the painting itself. And as I am often distracted, the call—a call to be present—often came at me violently. But in assent came surrender, and in surrender a rapid, calligraphic mark-making that enabled me to enter the world of the painting—its air-filled depths and bending grasses. In entering, it was possible to make contact with and learn from the nonhuman powers in the land. Like the painting (100 Roots) itself, this new pictorial practice continues to yield its secrets in my current series of micro-landscapes, each of which is 12 inches square. Like California’s micro-climates, each intimate world is possessed of its own weather and ecology.