Finding the place of my paintings within the world of art is perhaps a task better left to those who study art. My guess is that my paintings lie somewhere at the crossroads between naturalism and Impressionism. Surely what I do is far from the traditional Naturalism epitomized by pale pastel drawings of flowers, fruit and leaves, neatly arranged over a cursive script of the botanical name. Yet, I was pleased when a friend, who was a professor of forestry, was able to identify every tree in my paintings by genus and species.Neither am I focused exclusively on capturing a moment of light, as true impressionists are. Claude Monet, whom I think of as the ultimate impressionist, showed the world that, under the right lighting conditions, even a train station is beautiful. If he were alive today I’m sure he would be able to reveal the hidden beauty of a strip mall. My appreciation of beauty is more confined to Nature. I remember travelling with my father-in-law, Frank, when we drove past a vast landscape of rolling hills covered with flowers. The fields were also studded with giant wind turbines. Later, when I showed my pictures to the family, Frank, who is an engineer, asked what happened to the beautiful windmills. He had assumed I had taken pictures of the turbines when I had carefully directed my camera so as to avoid them.The truth is that I have less interest in dicovering the particular genre of my art than I have in understanding its relationship to Nature. Years ago, at the opening of one of my art shows, someone asked me, while looking at my painting of an oak tree, “What is the relationship of your art to Nature?” Without hesitation, I told her that I was commissioned by the oak to paint its portrait. Although we had a good laugh at this absurd image, there was something satisfying about it. It stayed in my mind long afterward. Even today, the idea of being commissioned by a tree, strikes me as an appropriately humble position for humans to assume toward Nature. The fantasy of being commissioned by a tree restores to the natural world a significance that is larger than art and even larger than humanity. The highest Ideal I can imagine for painting is to provide a window through which the viewers can see something beautiful in Nature for the first time or can be reminded of something beautiful they had once known.