Zen Buddhists say words and images are inadequate to describe life and our experience of life, because they do not express the full truth. But words, images and sounds are the tools we are given and therefore we make an attempt to talk about the truth of life as best we can. It is the interaction and merger with nature reflecting the human that attracts me and creates a hybrid view of reality through my images. My paintings are an attempt to reveal the truth of my life. They act as visual journals and reflect my environmental concerns.

My images and methodologies reflect our collective, yet contradictory impulses and inclinations - indulgence, and denial, obscurity and revelation, the carnal and the cognitive. A celebration of complexity, they seek to present a world that is physically provocative, unapologetically poetic and undeniably beautiful.

I grew up on the prairies of South Dakota. The land there does not start or end but expands across miles of rolling plains and under the vast expanse of sky. With the great absurdity of everyday life taking place within these extraordinary distances, the people have adjusted to the prairies. This is reflected in their humor--dry, deadpan, self-deprecating and their manner--stoic, flat, and fixed in the present.