I live in a small farming town along the shores of the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts, a place with hawks and herons, deer and bobcats, and too many woodchucks for the good of the garden. I’ve been a specialist bookseller of rare and obscure books on the arts, a writer & poet, and drawn & painted since I was young.

I work on my canvases not only with brushes and palette knives, but also with pieces of cardstock, paper towels, my fingers, and even the odd toothbrush. I’m a fan of Danish landscape painter Marie Louise Eriksen, who advocates avoiding preconceptions and concentrates on mark-making, colors, and forms. I find that for every painting that ends up where I thought it would end up when I started out, two more end up someplace completely different. I usually have half a dozen in-process canvases sitting in the studio, patiently waiting for me to see where they want to go.

Like a piece of music, or a book or a poem, a painting should make you feel something; the heart of painting is emotion. If a piece isn’t making me feel something I let it hang around until it tells me where it really wants to go- I know that this is anthropomorphizing a piece of painted canvas to a silly degree, but I also know that treating the painting process like this works, at least for me.