I paint outdoors near my home in remote farmlands of central France. The direct experience of being in the landscape, often standing in the same field for months on end, is crucial to my creative process. My work in recent years has focused primarily on the setting sun, the moon, the sky, and those moments leading towards nightfall, and the night itself, whereby the landscape is either being obliterated, almost devoured by the sun’s all-consuming luminosity or being dissolved by the receding, diminishing light.

The landscape in this part of France is rather flat, soft and gentle with small tracts of farmland dotted with islands of trees and lines of hedges delineating boundaries. Cows and sheep graze in meadows next to slow moving rivers. The skies are big, the end-of-day light warm and sensuous. The setting sun and the unfolding sunset is ephemeral, transitory, fleeting where nothing remains constant. Clouds form, move, dissolve, morph, taking on different colors, disappearing into a richly complex atmosphere. Luminescent orange moons rise and fall over a dark silent world. The night landscape is bathed in the cool, bluish light of big full moons unimpeded by pollution or ambient light. Planets hover and are then surrounded by stars, constellations, the Milky Way, all slowly moving across the night sky. Deer screech and bark in the woods then race across a field, an occasional owl swoops in the darkness, moths flutter around my headlamp, moisture comes out of the earth, the temperature falls. I stand there, painting, connecting to the profundity of the Universe, with Awe, and a profound sense that we are nearly inconsequential participants in this huge vast cosmos, together, in the miracle of creation.