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I remember being mildly horrified the first time someone said to me, with great admiration, "Your painting looks just like a picture!" At first, this compliment rather baffled me until I realized that my painting's sense of verisimilitude had impressed its admirer as being almost photographic; like a "picture". The fact is, that we are so used to 'reading' photographs, and are also so convinced of their supposed fidelity to nature (even with the increasing prevalence of digital manipulation), that we unintentionally hold them up as yardsticks to every realist painter's vision. Although the majority of my landscape paintings are highly detailed, they are not meant to conform to the confines of strict Photorealist painting. The priority for me has always been the creation of a convincing illusion that makes my visual point, and any photographic source material (often from multiple views) is always subservient to the necessities of that vision. Each painting, then, is the result of some degree of transformation of the original source. In some works the evolution may appear dramatic and in some rather minimal, but the significance is that the painting is based on an my emotional reaction to a particular landscape, quality of light, or time of day, and is never simply an attempt to recreate the surface reality of any photograph.
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