The series, Salem County Romantic, features the Delaware River landscape in southern New Jersey, and summons the strangeness and the wonder, as well as the beauty and the unloveliness of local sites. The repetition, continual reinterpretation, daily discovery and infatuation with Helms Cove’s combinations of coastline, mudflats, sky, river, and light infuses the work with a contemporary Romantic sensibility. Daily practice has aided in the development of a personal landscape vocabulary made up of unequal parts memory, invention, and observation; in 2021, I adopted the practice of painting a small watercolor every day.

The mud flats provide for endless inventiveness of shape, color, and line, by the flattening of the picture plane to leave ample space for playing with surface shapes and drawn lines of paint. I often return to the composition of a pile of wreckage, rocks or tidewrack in the foreground or with the fire and ice palette of a brilliant winter sunset projected onto an icy cove, as in Ice Sledge.