The palpable energy of the city, both literal and figurative, continues to inspire my urban landscape painting.  Time spent painting various cities around the world causes me to increasingly focus upon what goes into creating these complex structures.  The complexities of building and maintaining large cities are legion, yet we often give no more thought to these matters than we do to flipping on a light switch or turning the ignition switch in our car.  But where does the electricity that powers that light come from?  And when we drive off to work each morning, do we consider where the fuel for our cars originated?   We give its source little thought but we miss it terribly when it is no longer there.  Energy is what allows the city to exist, sustaining its glow from afar.

Much of my work focuses upon the emergent city of Vancouver, a city that finds itself in the midst of a transitioning global economy.  Despite facing issues that relate to growth -- the rising cost of energy, transportation and housing, along with homelessness, drugs and crime -- Vancouver’s downtown area continues to grow at a rapid pace.  Other long established neighborhoods are now expected to accept new forms of housing while being bisected by increasingly clogged arterial corridors.  Urban discomfort increases while we try to maintain a standard of living that is difficult to replicate anywhere else.

My paintings depict how people occupy this fragile infrastructure of roads and buildings, with all its splendor and flaws.  The diversity of human experience found in the Downtown East Side or on South Granville Street often produces the same results -- each is imbued with a sense of hope and hopelessness, irrespective of one’s socio-economic circumstances. The work then becomes a study of the life found within a constantly evolving modern metropolis adapting to the stresses and changes imposed by an increasingly complicated energy dependant economy.

The night, as found in my work, is representational of transition, in the movement of one day, or phase, to the next.  As the day draws to a close we reflect on what has occurred in the hours before.  Once we are asleep we become unaware of what is occurring in our own neighbourhood and even less so in those neighbourhoods or cities found outside our purview. Once daybreak arrives it can provide hope or despair.  But the night is our time of transition.  Just what we are transitioning to, in increasingly complex energy-centric economies, is what gives me great pause as I reflect while I work.