I paint to celebrate flora that are happily living in their natural habitats. I am concerned about our environment but my art is not didactic. I am not trying to persuade the viewer to take any particular position on conservation. On the other hand, perhaps my simple objective of celebrating nature is a good starting point for reevaluating our priorities about nature. We won’t preserve what we don’t value.I work in a studio from photographs. I find that this is the best way to capture nature in its wild, messy state. Often pristine Nature is found in places where setting up an easel for any length of time would be impossible. I rarely paint flora that are cultivated and grown in formal parks or botanical gardens because such plants lack the surroundings that give them their characteristic forms. A forest tree, for example, in the middle of a field, spreads out. You rarely see such trees in a spreading form in their natural habitat where they grow tall to compete with others for light. Whenever I paint a tree of uncharacteristic shape I draw attention to the anomaly in my written story and in the title of the painting. For example, “Stretching Birch” is a painting of a birch tree, which has been able to stretch out its limbs because it is growing in an open field.Second, when taking photographs, I try to imitate what my eyes would do if I were actually at the scene. While a camera freezes the image at one focus and exposure, being present in nature is an interactive experience. We do not experience Nature as a snapshot. The pupils of our eyes dilate to reveal the details within the dark shadows of tree trunks and they constrict to reveal the colors and cloud shapes of a bright sky. My eyes change their focus too, from the distance to the foreground. After viewing a scene from various vantage points, and under different lighting conditions, I form a rich mental image, composed of many visual experiences˜a mental collage˜that no camera can capture in a single image. In parallel to the process of vision, I take many pictures at different exposures and focuses and perspectives. When I get back to the studio there is not a single photo that captures the magic of the scene. Each photo gives me a piece of visual information that can be used in the construction of the composition. The overexposed photo completely washes out the sky but preserves the details in the dark trunks of the trees. The underexposed photo captures the colors of the sky and contours of the clouds while the trunks of the trees are totally black. My photos are merely visual “notes” from which I attempt to construct a painting that evokes the experience of being there.Finally, I embrace complexity. Just because nature is ordered does not mean it is simple. It has a very complex organization that cannot be discerned by the inexperienced eye. To most of us, unspoiled nature looks messy. The tendency to organize perception is a strong feature of the human mind. The result is orderly and boring. I actively resist the temptation to clean up Nature. I do eliminate telephone poles from a scene I am painting, but I resist the temptation to remove a broken branch or straighten a leaning tree. Complexity is an important component of what is exciting about the natural world. Also, complex scenes can hold our attention longer. One of the comments I love to hear from viewers of my paintings is that the more they look at a painting the more they see in it.