“This painting began in returning to a familiar place – a barn that’s been a main fixture in my life.

”For years, I’ve been watching and painting people within a studio. In this turning of tides in my work, I want to engage with what hides in plain sight, the monumental in the familiar, the unassuming. Reality spontaneously offered.

”Entering the barn and setting out mirrors I chose to work from life so that I could be in that space long enough to get to know it in a new way. Witness activity, my own, and the changing shapes, textures, and light fall of a place that shaped my aesthetic language. Cloister-like channels of light, purple glowing patinas, structure holding still the hill it was built into.

”An arrangement kept catching me, one mainly set in shadow the space and the person felt in unison. The silhouette looking back at me in the mirror appeared almost like a wooden carving, just as much a part of the barn as the wooden beams.

”The still moment of the painting became a result of many moments, an amalgam of subtle changes, of selection, of failing attempts and of lucky breaks, of trying to get to the nucleus of being here now. Paintings never feel like arrivals but I’ve found a footpath in beginning here.”