My modernist-style watercolors are foremost, accessible paintings reflecting the experience of Maine; the intense, residual memory of what it was like to be drenched by the moving, vibrant sea, to be blanketed by the scent from fragrant pines and to be violet hand-stained with blueberry.  These experiences remain irreversibly internalized from my Maine childhood and provide a naturalist subject context for my paintings.

This painting series depicts the intertwining, forested and difficult, rocky trails of coastal Maine.

The images are created with saturated watercolors and strong brush strokes, expressing the action of the abstracted landscape. Intense, shifting energies of life systems on the trails, appear in the paintings- evidence of natural energy in motion-the cloud strewn sky, wind swept pines, and glacier strewn rock piles, sometimes covered with verdant moss or left sharp and bare. These are evidence of Nature’s conflicting forces and transformations full of beauty, mystery, intensity and difficulty. Such images may also serve as primary metaphors for human complexity. Human systems are in constant energetic flux with intertwining contradictions, multiple paradoxes, and layers of symbolic meanings. Thus, as an artist and psychotherapist my paintings and poetic images of nature symbolize the world as a place of constant motion and change -- enigmatic, contradictory and paradoxical. Winding, difficult, forested trails serve as metaphor for these dynamics.

 Through the mysterious process of engaging with works of non-representational art, we are drawn to search for meaning. Looking at abstracted nature through the framed painting provides a focus point- an opportunity for new stimuli. There is potential for aliveness with this new imagery and new ideas may arise-sparking the potential for wider, emotional experience. As we are moved, curiosity stirs and rigidities of mind may give way to more openness of perception. From the honest meeting with such dynamic imagery taken internally, (whether natural or artistic), will we be psychologically, a little better prepared to approach our multifaceted lives? In order to interpret the world in motion we need new kinds of templates to avoid future shock--more dynamic ones, in order to find meanings that are not as concrete.  Can modern art, particularly, fluid, abstract depictions of nature provide an accessible template? Nature viewed as a complex system reminds us of its parallel -The Divine- a resource essential to our search for a meaningful extant future.