“Architecture, History and Art are eternally linked: I have always believed this. As such, my paintings are histories of various places, both real and imagined, as they have developed over time. My paintings can also be likened to a series of archaeological digs into layers of the past--where geometrical linework recalls both ideal and tangible aspects of the world, where color and texture both hint at an emotional and even spiritual mystery.

These paintings are architectural landscapes precisely because they deal with the artistic creation of the earthly terrain; they are themselves creations of architectural elements merged with the sensual qualities of created space. Plans, elevations, sections and ornaments work with material, scale, light and atmosphere--all enhancing the sense of place. I have assembled and overlapped these elements to reflect the ways I have encountered, observed and recorded them; but ultimately, to reflect the way I remember them. And memory is seldom defined by a singular viewpoint. It is rather a collage of multiple views, often fragmentary and presented simultaneously. I hope that this is what the viewer sees in my drawings and my paintings.

This concept of simultaneity and multiplicity in the archaeological impressions of a built landscape and in the re-use of ancient buildings (or their fragments) form the twin themes of my work. As a southerner and architecturally educated, attraction to the classical tradition--and the many revivals of that tradition-- comes naturally. Perhaps for this reason, Rome has always figured prominently in my works, which are about the appearance of places and the meditation on places. The classicism of Thomas Jefferson--to cite one prominent example--speaks to this tradition, and more importantly, to the reworking of tradition. Jefferson's University of Virginia is a model of ideal classical adaptation, with distinct political implications, but also one which speaks to the multiple uses of tradition in public space and historical memory. His more private Monticello reveals and revels in a personal quirkiness--the result of historical, practical and topographical novelties expanded from Andrea Palladio. I like to think that my works play on those same themes, but do so in even more rarefied tradition--one that also has roots in the Italian architectural tradition--which is in architectural painting of the ideal and unbuilt, or the decayed and ideal.

There is, at the same time, a purely literary tendency to cultivate and re-position places and events of the past in order to make relevant the present. Though universal, this backward-glancing frame of mind is also particularly strong in the south. William Faulkner and Lillian Hellman both erected equivalent literary Pantheons built upon ruined fragments rich with wonder, ambiguity and promises patinated with layered truths. It is Hellman's autobiographical sketch Pentimento that I most identify with while working on my paintings - that is, while describing places that lie beyond the readily apparent or the historically accurate but that are real nonetheless.”