Artist's statement for the show, "Glimpses of Glory".

"When he doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with the lights in it'. It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the morning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it..." Annie Dillard in "PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK" My parents tell me that when I was a child and we were all vacation driving through our "picture province" they would exclaim at the beauty of this view or that and I would be curled up in the back seat with my brothers reading comic books and resenting the interruptions. (To look is always a matter of choice.) Another hillside, another river, another cove; big deal! Now, a stop for fish'n'chips or a chance to yell at echo hill, that interested me. Gradually, I began to look more closely and see more clearly.

"How did the holiday go?" the returning vacationer is asked.

"I don't know", he replies, "I don't have photos back yet."

We try to impose our vision on what is around us. We drag our cameras around trying to make our surroundings fit our tunnel vision, often unaware even of what is in the periphery, let alone beneath what we see or think we see... "You got the waterfall, but you cut off Uncle Fred's head!"

But sometimes we get a glimpse of the glory that infuses all of creation, Like Annie Dillard's "tree with the lights in it" and those moments are always a surprise and a joy. Freeman Patterson says that by understanding the camera and practising what he calls "relaxed attentiveness" one can capture something of those moments from time to time. But if you remember a moment when you got one of those glimpses and happened to have your camera with you and shot a few frames, then I expect your response when you got your photos back from the developer was one of disappointment... "That's not what I saw."

I am still learning to see. I have a bit more control over the canvasses I paint than I do over my camera. Still, I know that the title I have chosen for this show is an audacious one. It's unlikely that viewing these paintings will provide you with one of those rare glimpses of glory but, for the purposes of looking a little more closely, please believe me when I tell you that, before I put brush to canvas, I had it.