The vast majority of my landscape paintings depict or are inspired by places in the Hillsborough NC area. Hillsborough’s sidewalks and streets are wonderful places to walk, profuse with gardens and vistas tunneling through the overhanging foliage. These paintings share a broad theme of paths leading into the interior spaces of exterior places, views where activity is in the shadows as much as the light. Each painting has an associated GPS coordinate, which can be copied into GoogleMaps to pinpoint exactly where the scene can be viewed in real life.

The Peccadillo Pearl paintings were originally created for display in Peccadillo, a classy ‘speakeasy’ bar in Carrboro just on the border with Chapel Hill. Vividly colorful in daylight, the paintings were crafted to have presence in the very dim light of the establishment, and became an important part of Peccadillo’s unique ambiance. Fifteen paintings had been created and displayed at the establishment, six or seven at a time on a rotating basis, in the four years before Peccadillo permanently closed in April 2016. The artist continues to add additional paintings to the series, with available paintings and works in progress on view at the Thomas Stevens Gallery in downtown Hillsborough, NC.

My landscape body of work of the last decade could be described as representational, depicting views of specific Hillsborough locations that observe ‘interiors’ of ‘exterior’ places.. People often initially see my Oculus paintings as abstracts, and comment how much they depart from my previous work. Yet these paintings are indeed very representational, observing the readily identifiable structure of the beloved A Sight to Behold stickwork sculpture by artist Patrick Dougherty which stood on Hillsborough’s Riverwalk from late 2015 until early 2019. This series show a view from inside the sculpture, looking up through the oculus in the domed roof.