Landscape drawing, to me, is at least as much about expression as it is about representation. I strive to create mark-making that’s as vigorous as painting, yet maybe even more immediate and spontaneous. Although I occasionally work up very small thumbnail preparatory sketches for paintings, I have long felt that drawing is its own art form, and not merely a prelude to another form. The drawings here are all fully independent, autonomous expressions of landscape, created with pencil or pastel.

Landscape drawing has its challenges. The challenge of representing a subject as physically vast as a landscape, rather than a focus on an object like a human figure. The challenge of building very deep tonality while keeping the feel spontaneous and fresh. And the challenge of scale: using mostly a small, fine point to cover what are typically large areas of paper. However it’s exactly these challenges that drive the expressiveness of drawing. For example outline is simply not found in nature, yet its use in drawing tends to be more proprietary to the medium. If a work of art is created using lines, likelier than not, it is a drawing.

In my landscape drawings I look to make marks that have the vitality of abstract expressionism, only on a more intimate scale, and representative of a place and an atmosphere.