The Travelers is an ongoing series of vibrantly colorful paintings created using multiple layers of oil paint and inspired by my archive of photographs. The series explores my journey from corporate lawyer to parent to full-time working artist and is primarily drawn from moments captured in my photographs of the Hamptons and Montauk where my family and I have spent almost every summer for more than 10 years, New York City where I lived for nearly 15 years, and the Hudson Valley where I currently live and work. I’ve also been inspired to create this series using photos of my travels and various trips I’ve taken over the years.
In The Travelers I’m working to create art that evokes the passage of time as it is - fluid and transitory. By looking back at my archive of photography work (even, and perhaps most importantly, the work that I’m not that proud of), I can look to the future and imagine where my work might go. I look to where I’ve been to inspire to go further and to push myself. I’m creating paintings that are an interpretation of specific moments that have passed while imagining how they could be different.
Like the majority of my work, these oil paintings are textured and heavily layered. My goal in my photos is to effectively capture the energy of any given scene whether it’s a city scape, a landscape or a portrait, and I interpret that energy and it comes to life as a painting by combining smaller, meticulous, nuanced, and purposeful strokes layered over broad and urgently placed paint. I strive to create movement using a combination of paint colors that are inspired by my photos and my memories and my goal is for my paint strokes to illustrate the movement and evolution of time - year to year, moment to moment. I am always interested in, and in fact I prefer, flawed beauty over perfection and I explore these two concepts in The Travelers. I am always interested in how a person grows and changes and learns (hopefully) from their mistakes. In The Travelers I’m hoping to capture that vulnerability, depth, growth and those lessons by looking back at my photography work and reimagining them as paintings.
See more of The Travelers here.
Learn more about my series of black and white paintings, Ebb and Flow, here.
“Alive”
Captured in Montauk, New York, this photograph inspired the paintings below.
“These City Lights”
One of my favorite photos to date, this image has inspired so many paintings, including the ones below.
