My paintings drawings and etchings are influenced by the contrasting mix of objects, images, and places--natural/man-made, native/non-native, local/imported, domestic/foreign--that make up our modern environment. Cut apple blossoms from a midwestern backyard are placed next to a potted Arizona cactus. A pet parrot from the Amazon roams through a New York City apartment. our travelsbring us an Iowa landscape one day, and a view of the Tuscan hills on the next. We can visit zoos and natural history museums and see native local animals side by side with animals taken from other parts of the world. There are places where we can see in a singleview the simultaneous destruciton and preservation of a landscape. In my current home in Savannah, Georgia, I watch alligators and wading birds in our local wildlife refuge against a backdrop of smog-spewing factories.

For the last decade, I have neem intrigued by the idea of "wilderness" and its change from being something mysterious and unknown (pre-twentieth century) to being longed for, romanticized, mourned and desparately reconstructed. I have deep feelings about environmental issues, but I don't see the focus of my work as didactic. My paintings and drawings often reflect my own struggle to make sense of this chaos. I see my pieces as a catalyst for thinking about and discussing issues that address the influence that human beings have on the "natural" environment and the way in which the natural environment responds.

There have been several key influences in the development of my ideas and compositions: artists of the Renaissance, especially Albrecht Durer, Chicago painter Ivan Albright with his overly-active surfaces; Mexican artist Remedios Varo, who creates finely-crafted, ethereal worlds: and early 18th- and 19th-century renderings of flora and fauna, especially the work of John James Audubon. The Netherlandish still life and hunt scene painters-Frans Snyders, Rachel Ruysch, and Willem Kalf--have probably had the strongest influence on my work. I have always been drawn to the technical/formal aspects of these paintings. But more than that, I find many societal parallels between the 21st-century United States and 17th-century Holland-- both societies being comprised of numerous wealthy consumers able to import food, objects, flora and fauna from all over the world.

Non-painting/drawing sources have made a significant impact on my work. Many of my compositions derive their artificiality and crowded arrangements from the often unsettling natural history displays of the Field Museum in Chicago. The novels of Gunter Grass and the films of Peter Greenaway have focused my attention on rituals related to food and possession. Travel writing by naturalists like Peter Matthiessen has led to the inclusion of exotic and threatened habitats in the background of many pieces.

The manner in which I arrive at a composition reflects a 21st-century perception of the world:a perception that is comprised of groups of disconnected images often removed from the viewer's direct experience. To reflect this way of perceiving, I collect and combine images from many sources: books, catalogs, magazines, photos that I have taken, sketches, and direct observations. I often combine disparate light sources. The challenge for me is to use the imposed structure of tradtional representational drawings and paintings to unify all these elements compositionally.