I didn’t come to Provincetown thinking I’d return to painting. In 1992, I came for the summer with a close friend who was dying of AIDS. Those months were shaped by grief, but also by the quiet strength of this community a place that held artists, caretakers, and friends in equal measure. I stayed, and over time, this town gave me permission to return to myself as an artist.
I had studied painting at Boston University but drifted from it in the years after graduation. Boston’s art world felt distant, and I found myself working in public health, behind a desk. But here, in Provincetown, I was surrounded by people who lived and breathed creative work. Slowly, I re-entered the rhythm of painting not with the urgency of proving something, but with a curiosity about what I still had to say, and what painting still had to offer.
My work doesn’t begin with a fixed idea. I tend to start with a mood, a shape, or sometimes just a color. Over time, forms emerge interiors, vessels, figures, landscapes abstracted almost beyond recognition. I’ve come to trust the process, to allow for detours and accidents, which often lead me to the most honest parts of a piece. I rarely use black straight from the tube, but I discovered a hue made from phthalo blue, raw umber, and yellow ochre that now threads its way through many of my paintings. It’s a color that holds depth without flatness, and somehow feels like home.
There’s no single story I try to tell in my paintings. If anything, I’m more interested in atmosphere—what lingers in a room after someone leaves, or what shifts when a certain light touches an object. People tell me my work has a quiet, haunting quality, and maybe that’s true. What matters to me is that the work invites someone in, that it makes space for looking closely.
These days, I paint in a shared studio above the Provincetown Post Office with a couple of close friends. My path hasn’t been linear, but I’ve found something sustaining here. Painting remains a way to pay attention, to stay present, and to engage with the world as it changes around me and within me.
