In 2025, I painted a small series of nocturns called “Mid-Century Midnight.” These paintings featured Mid-Century Modern homes from Windsor Park, my neighborhood here in Tucson, AZ, and were sold to raise money for my Neighborhood Association’s campaign to have our subdivision listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Our nomination was accepted by the State Historic Preservation Office, and we are now officially a historic district!

Despite having achieved our goal, I have continued to feel the desire to return to these intriguing little night studies. I wanted to see how such pieces would perform in my Wyoming Gallery too, and knowing how regional art markets can be, I resolved to spend some time observing Jackson Hole, WY, at night during my last visit to the town for the Fall Arts Festival in 2025. I spent two evenings wandering the town square and adjacent residential areas with a friend, taking candid photos with my cell phone as I went. These references became the inspiration for this latest series of paintings, “Jackson Hole Nocturns.” I wanted to capture the sense of this bustling tourist destination in the late evening, when it goes quiet and seems to be holding its breath. I made a deliberate effort to capture radically different scenes, from commercial to residential. Whether a cozy cottage with warmly lit windows or a more modern build with garage floodlights shining like eyes in the darkness, I wanted to communicate the stillness of a world at rest with only a hint of the private goings on inside. The Jackson Hole Center for the Arts glows at night, a yawning brightness anticipating the next day and perhaps aping daylit for a custodian or two behind its walls. Alleys wind behind stretches of galleries, restaurants, and souvenir shops, crammed with dumpsters and spider-webbed with tangles of power lines, lit only by the light of an open rear entrance or the urine-yellow wash of a street lamp. All of these scenes bristle with anticipation, mystery, and liminality. The limited, desaturated palettes, close value ranges, deep shadows, and the soft, fuzzy-edges of night invite the viewer to squint and step forward for a closer look. Such investigation could be innocent curiosity, voyeurism, or a little of both, but the viewer is left with sense of having peeked behind a curtain. The nod to Edward Hopper is, of course, a calculated one.

Throughout my career, I have never been afraid to step outside of my comfort zone and try something new. These pieces are not only a departure from my wildlife work, but address almost the exact opposite intentions that have driven most of my artistic career. Most of my work for the last twenty years has focused on animal subjects, deliberately removed from their natural environments and recontextualized, typically in direct furtherance of an underlying theme. Placing a subject in an unexpected context forces the viewer to question what they think they know about the subject, to challenge their preconceptions and really look with a level of focus and clarity few of us bring to bear in most of our daily interactions. My Jackson Hole Nocturns function on an almost exactly opposite premise; in these pieces, context is everything. In fact, the subject matter becomes almost incidental to the broader idea. In these little paintings, it's all about the atmosphere, all about a moment in a specific place at a specific time. These paintings are about absence, about a pause to recharge, about the void left behind when people are at rest, and indeed about the endless possibilities of the day to come when that blue-grey silence will be drowned out by the buzz of humanity once again.