I paint what you can only see out of the corner of your eye.

Not the thing you're looking at directly. The thing at the edge of your attention, the suggestion that reality is a little larger than what direct focus can hold. I've always been more interested in what might be there if you stayed open to it than in what you can prove is there.

I grew up a competitive swimmer, and I think that shaped something in how I see. Swimming puts you inside a medium you can't see through clearly. Light behaves strangely, what's below is always present but never fully visible, and the surface tells you things about what's happening underneath. I've been painting from that instinct ever since, even when the paintings have nothing to do with water.

I live on the coast in Moss Beach, California, and the Pacific is in the work constantly. Not as subject matter, but as a quality of light and atmosphere, a physical understanding of depth and surface, a sense that what you can see is only part of what's there.

My process is built around layers. I work in acrylic, building up and glazing back, letting earlier decisions stay present beneath later ones. The surface holds time. Different states of the painting remain visible simultaneously, the way memory and place accumulate rather than replace each other.

I'm interested in paintings that reward slow looking, that give something up on the tenth minute they withheld in the first.