ARCHIVES 2026
I have always been interested in the way light can transform an ordinary place. Growing up on a farm in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, I remember looking across the pasture in the early morning and seeing familiar things suddenly become something else, the grass turning yellow and orange, shadows becoming blue, and the whole landscape feeling alive. I remember thinking, One day I will paint that. That fascination with light and color is still at the center of my work.
I paint primarily outdoors because I want to respond directly to what I am seeing. There is something important to me about standing in a particular place at a particular moment and trying to understand what is happening visually. The light is changing, colors are shifting, and the relationships between things are constantly moving. Painting from life gives me a chance to slow down and really look.
But I don't think of my paintings as attempts to simply reproduce the landscape. I am more interested in interpretation, reducing what I see to its essential shapes, values, and color relationships. Before many paintings, I make a small value study to eliminate unnecessary information and find the major divisions of light and shadow. I am looking for the big pieces first. What is the largest dark shape? Where is the light? What shape is sitting next to another shape? What can I leave out?
This way of thinking comes partly from my background in graphic design. I was taught to explore an idea through many small sketches before committing to a finished design, and I always loved that process. There is something exciting about taking a complicated scene and reducing it to a few simple shapes. Working this way makes painting feel like a puzzle. I am given all of this visual information, but I have to decide what is important enough to keep.
A tree can become a dark shape. A field can become a collection of interlocking colors. A barn can become a few simple planes of light and shadow. A distant hill can become a horizontal band of color. The subject is still there, but I am trying to get underneath the description of the subject and find the structure that makes the painting work.
Color is the part of painting that pulls me in the most. I remember seeing Cezanne, Van Gogh, Vuillard, and Monet for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago and being fascinated by what they were doing with color and tone. They were clearly looking at the world, but they weren't simply copying what they saw. They were making decisions. They were changing relationships, simplifying things, and building their own visual worlds.
That has become increasingly important to me. I am interested in artists who have found their own way of painting rather than simply adopting an established formula. Cezanne, Matisse, Diebenkorn, and many others remind me that there is no single correct way to interpret what we see. The landscape can be a starting point rather than a set of rules.
I don't want to paint like someone else. I don't want every painting to look like it came from the same school or recipe. I want to keep figuring out what works for me.
That doesn't mean abandoning observation. In fact, it means looking harder. The more closely I look, the more I notice that color doesn't always behave the way we expect it to. Shadows aren't simply darker versions of the objects they fall across. Green fields contain violets, blues, oranges, and yellows. A white building can become almost any color depending on the light around it. Sometimes the most convincing color is the one that seems least literal.
I think of this as painting light falling on shapes.
The same place can become an entirely different subject depending on the light. Morning light, afternoon sun, an overcast day, or evening light can completely change the color and character of a landscape. This is one reason I often return to the same locations. I am not necessarily looking for a new subject. I am looking for a new way to see a familiar one.
I might paint the same barn several times and end up with completely different paintings. The structure hasn't changed. What has changed is the light, the atmosphere, the color relationships, and my own response to them. That is what keeps painting interesting to me.
I live on the family farm, where an old chicken coop has become my studio and gallery. My Wife, Corbin and I teach art classes in the chicken coop, and my Daughter Violet plays in it. The surrounding fields, barns, river, woods, roads, and marshes continue to provide an endless supply of subjects. I can walk outside and find something to paint almost every day. But after all these years, I don't think I am really painting the farm. I am painting the way the farm looks right now.
The way the light falls across it. The way one shape sits against another. The way a warm color pushes against a cool one. The way a familiar place can suddenly look strange and beautiful.
I have also found that painting has changed the way I experience the places around me. When I am not painting, I am still looking. I notice the color of a field from the car, the shadow underneath a tree, the way a barn catches the last light of the day. Plein air painting has made the landscape feel less like background and more like something I am constantly engaged with.
This is also why I continue to make small paintings. A small panel allows me to respond quickly and intuitively. Sometimes a painting comes together in a short period of time, and there is an energy in that immediacy that I don't want to lose. Other paintings require more thought and develop into larger, more studied pieces. I enjoy having both experiences. The small paintings can be like visual notes—little records of a particular place, light, and moment.
Teaching has also become an important part of my life as an artist. Until this past year, I taught art at UW–Baraboo, where I had the opportunity to work with students and think about painting from a different perspective. Teaching has made me more conscious of the decisions I make when I paint, because explaining an idea to someone else often forces me to understand it more clearly myself. Unfortunately, UW Baraboo was closed this past year, bringing that chapter to an unexpected end. I am grateful for the time I had there and for what I learned from my students. Teaching has reinforced my belief that painting is not something that ever needs to be completely figured out. There is always another question to ask, another way to see something, and another possibility to explore.
Archives 2026 is the beginning of an ongoing yearly record of my paintings. I like the idea of creating an archive rather than simply producing a collection of images. Each year represents a particular point in my development as a painter: what I was looking at, what I was thinking about, what I was struggling with, and what I was discovering.
I don't expect the paintings to stay the same from year to year. In fact, I hope they don't.
I want to keep experimenting. I want to keep finding ways to simplify. I want to keep pushing color and brushwork and composition. Most of all, I want to keep developing a visual language that feels like my own.
The landscape gives me the shapes. The light gives me the color. The painting is where I get to make something of them.
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