Edge of Daicey Pond, June 15, 1994, oil on canvas, 20" x 24"

Observations of nature and remembered experience have always served me in my work, and in recent years this approach has dominated my interests. Van Gogh describes the experience in a letter to his brother Theo dated September 1882. "I come back dissatisfied - I put it away, and when I have rested a little, I go and look at it with a kind of fear ... I still have too clearly in my mind that splendid subject, to be satisfied with what I made of it. But after all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me ..."

This exhibit presents work done in Maine and images painted in the Bourgogne and Languedoc regions of France during stays in 1992, 1994, and 1995. Two years before his death Vincent wrote to Theo thusly: "... instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color arbitrarily so as to express myself forcibly." Vincents personal and moral risk-taking established a realm wherein multitudes have now worked without suffering the reproach that he met. I number myself among his beneficiaries. Yet in art nothing is ever fully solved, and so the challenge to undertake some risk always presents itself.

For me it is the challenge to express something essential, something rhythmic, connective, and dynamic beneath the vast broken surface of visual experience. Vincent wrote to his brother in September 1888, "It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding. These images from Maine and France are rooted in places where Ive lingered and meditated, and where first impressions have thereby worn away. I hope that in some of these pieces, grown from the common ground where inner life and external reality meet, nature has told me something."