Objects, things that I could hold in my hand or put in my pocket, have always had a life of their own in my imagination and a powerful resonance in my world. The small toy that my cousin played with when she visited, the hat that my Father wore, the rock I always tripped on in the path to the mailbox, the coffee cup my girlfriend drank from; all these things, these inanimate, mute objects, acquired and then carried in them a force and an energy through their association with the peopled world. But it is the existence that they possess of their own, their own �life � in the universe of objects and the world itself, that is even more mysterious and beguiling.

I know their world has a very different sense of time, a patience and a calm that is unknown in the world of people. I can put a bowl on the table, and I can walk out of the room, leave for a day, a month, or a lifetime; each and every second filled with my struggling and straining or laughing and indulging. And when I walk back into that room, that bowl will still be sitting there on the table where I put it, dusty perhaps, but unchanged, not so much waiting as simply, and profoundly, existing. Objects exhibit a harmony, a peace and a co-existence with the world that makes the world I inhabit seem frantic and a bit absurd by comparison.

This respect for and connection to objects and their perceived world underlies my pursuits as a still life painter. At the same time, the things in the paintings are there primarily to fulfill the demands of the painting itself, much the way actors are in a play to fulfill the demands of the script. Any symbolic or metaphoric intention is subservient to the formal demands presented by the specific needs of each painting. I am trying to hit a particular visual note through the combined actions and interactions of the formal elements in the painting. The paintings are an attempt to construct or discover a set of relationships that are harmonious and at the same time imbued with a hint of tension. This formal tension is heightened by embedding these abstract qualities within the illusion of the image. In each painting I attempt to strike a balance between a clear and convincing realism and a clear and charged formal construction and in so doing create a remarkable event out of the most ordinary of circumstances.