I wish to emulate Albert Pinkham Ryder's passionate, adventurous, mythic, dream-like oils in the Romantic Tradition.  And capture the sea's stillness as American Luminists, like Martin Johnson Heade did. The genre of marine painting isn't the point.  It's the tale at sea, the allegory and the Luminist's magnificent veils of color glazes,  with Ryder's surface textures and sweeping gestural mark-making.  I  create art that sparks and inspires, whether to calm, comfort, or excite. 

 

For years, I worked exclusively in oils and discovered I could mimic similar effects with acrylics which offers me a faster and less toxic way of working in the studio.  Newer work is mainly Acrylics painted on navigation charts. 

 

The paper in this collection, nautical navigation charts, inspired me to take a leap back into seascapes. They were traversed by my late father, who passed recently.  He served twenty years in the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

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The sea has been an ongoing theme since I traveled and lived briefly on the Isle of Iona and studied art on the Isle of Mull, Scotland.  This fierce and magical sea has brought many families to America, including my own.  On my maternal lineage, I am a descendant of George Soule, indentured servant on the Mayflower.  My great, great grandfather Tom Court immigrated here from England and served as a merchant marine.  My paternal grandfather Pablo Mendez arrived from Cuba by ship.  Personally, my father and I loved to sail together at the Charles River Sailing Club of Boston.  In 1992, I sketched the sailors and took photos on the Polish Dar Mlodziezy full-rigged tail ship while in the Tall Ships parade.  In summer 2026, we sailed in Boston Harbor to view the Tall Ships.

The mysterious sea emerges in my art as an ongoing focus of curiosity, awe and respect.