"Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade,

hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade."    --William Blake

I am not entirely comfortable with the title "Impressionist Painter". It has become an antique term lacking description and in the end being merely a name tag.

I never paint the bucolic tableau for its scenic value alone, in fact, I couldn't care two cents about the bucolic in and of itself. If you paint for scenic value alone, congratulations!, you have made a painting to decorate a calendar or place mat.

Make no mistake, I am enthralled by the natural beauty of things. Yet these scenes are a foil to describe something else, the not so apparent, the innate, the self, the ephemeral. This organic and geometric arrangement could just as well be sitting on a tabletop. If I lived in the city, I'd paint skyscrapers. If I lived by the ocean, I'd paint seascapes.

The highest aesthetic is not a group decision. There is no democracy here.

The highest aesthetic is a deep personal vision whether re-stated or stated anew.

In the end, painting is just seeing and feeling. The motif is irrelevant.

This vision can, at times,  be in direct opposition to the bucolic tableau.

But, "DOES IT GO WITH THE COUCH?

There is no sin in this response, though I am inclined to be honest and say, " Get a slipcover!"

John Kane, American Painter