As a lifelong city dweller, I was gobsmacked by the wonders of the natural world when I moved half time from Brooklyn to rural Vermont ten years ago. I became obsessed with planting a terraced horticultural habitat of topiaries, fruit trees and perennials. I went at this full tilt for two summers until it began to feel as if the plants were the puppet masters and I was but a zombie with a shovel under their direction.  
 
The mature garden gives me a front row seat to the irrepressible urge of botanical growth, the changes in color, size, and texture of plants as they war with one another for space and light.  Creating this park-like environment profoundly re-shaped my perceptions of nature’s life forces and reinvented my ideas of landscape – discoveries that are at the foundation of my paintings.
 
My artistic ambition is to create worlds that have the vigor, inventiveness, and enveloping imagination of a sort of new nature in which hybrid plant/animal characters radiate a grow-or-die ethos. These invented worlds are portals into a universe of alternative biology and psychological spectacle. They reflect the instability of life and its changeability in a widening world, the purpose being to inspire a fresh but not always entirely comforting sense of possibility and wonderment. My work serves as a testament to the belief that, in spite of the fearsome decline of our environment, life continues on.  And often with exuberance.