Between Two Coasts: How Maine and California Are Changing My Abstract Landscape Painting
For years, landscape has been the starting point of my work. Lately, it has become less of a destination. Moving between Maine and California has changed the way I build paintings: I am increasingly interested in what happens when a place begins to dissolve into memory, weather, material, and abstraction.
The two coasts could hardly be more different, yet working between them has made their shared qualities more visible to me. Both are shaped by powerful forces—water, stone, wind, erosion, shifting light—and both resist staying still long enough to become a fixed image. That instability has become central to my abstract landscape painting practice.
What Maine keeps teaching me
On Mount Desert Island, I return again and again to granite, fog, tide, spruce, and the abrupt meeting of land and water. The landscape can feel solid and ancient, but it changes constantly. A shoreline disappears under the tide. Fog erases distance. Wet stone shifts color. Light can flatten a view and then suddenly open it again.
Rather than trying to reproduce those places, I have been letting their physical qualities enter the painting process. Layers are scraped back, covered, fractured, and recovered. Marks made with brushes, collage, and found objects accumulate like traces of weather. The painting becomes less a view of a landscape than a record of looking, remembering, and responding.
What California changes
California has shifted the work in a different direction. The light is harder and more exposed. Geology often feels closer to the surface. Distances open up. I notice dry edges, fractured forms, abrupt changes in color, and the tension between water and arid land.
Working in Marin County has also helped me loosen my attachment to recognizable scenery. I still begin with lived experience of place, but I am more willing to let a painting depart from it. A ridge can become a line. Water can become an interval of blue. A remembered coastline can break apart into shapes that no longer belong to one particular location.
From landscape to threshold
This gradual change has led to a new group of paintings I am calling Thresholds. The title describes the place I seem to be working now: between landscape and abstraction, solidity and atmosphere, observation and memory. I am interested in the instant when something is still recognizable but is no longer completely fixed.
Granite can dissolve into mist. A shoreline can become a boundary that refuses to hold. Weather can obscure a place while making its character more present. Those transitions feel more compelling to me than a literal description of where I stood.
Building the surface
Mixed media gives me a physical language for this. I work with acrylic, collage, oil and cold wax, ink, hand-painted and repurposed papers, and unconventional mark-making tools. I add and remove. I cover passages I like. I scrape through layers to find something underneath. The process is deliberately responsive rather than planned from beginning to end.
That matters because the landscapes that interest me are also built through accumulation and revision. Rock erodes. Sediment settles. Water redraws edges. Vegetation appears and disappears. A painting can hold similar evidence of change.
An evolving studio practice
I do not think of this as leaving landscape behind. If anything, I feel more connected to it because I am paying less attention to naming a particular view and more attention to how a place behaves: how it changes, what it retains, and what remains after the recognizable details begin to fall away.
Thresholds is still developing, and I expect the collection to change as I do. That is part of what interests me about it. The work is becoming quieter in some places, more abstract in others, and more dependent on material, surface, and ambiguity.
Studio visits
My studio is part workspace and part laboratory, and I enjoy sharing the process with people who are curious about how the paintings are made. Studio visits are available by appointment in Maine, and I am also happy to share California studio availability when I am working there. Visitors are welcome to see finished paintings, works in progress, and some of the materials and tools that shape the surfaces.
You can explore current work on Wild Horizon Fine Art or contact me
directly to arrange a studio visit or ask about an available painting.
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