Coastal Paintings

I have lived and worked on Cape Cod for most of my life, and the coastal landscape has been my primary subject for as long as I have been painting. The tidal flats at low water, the way light breaks across a sandy beach in late afternoon, the particular grey-green of the sea before a storm — these are the images I return to again and again, not because they are comfortable, but because they are inexhaustible.

Coastal painting is, at its core, a study in transience. The light changes by the minute. The tide reshapes the shore twice a day. What draws me to the subject is precisely that instability — the challenge of fixing something on canvas that refuses to hold still. I work quickly in the early stages, blocking in the large shapes of sky and water before the moment passes, then returning to the surface over days or weeks to resolve the quieter passages.

My teachers — Joseph McGurl and, through his example, John Stobart — both understood that the sea is not a backdrop. It is a presence with its own weight and mood. That lesson has stayed with me. I am less interested in painting a pretty view than in capturing a particular quality of light on a particular day: the flat silver of an overcast morning, the deep cobalt of a clear October afternoon, the warm amber that settles over the flats at the end of summer.

Most of the coastal works are painted on location, at least in their first stages, before being completed in the studio. The Cape offers an extraordinary range of coastal character within a small geography — the open Atlantic beaches of the Outer Cape, the sheltered harbors of the Bay side, the marshes and tidal creeks that run inland from the shore. Each has its own light, its own palette, its own demands.