I have been painting the urban environment in an abstract manner for twenty years. Early on I painted empty sidewalks and parking lots, transforming the mundane urban landscape with diffuse atmosphere and exaggerated color. In 2009, I began referencing midwestern internet traffic cameras as the basis for increasingly abstracted images. What interested me most were the undifferentiated stretches of the urban Midwest and the mercurial weather conditions. In my paintings, the empty vistas and changing light evoke a degree of wistful contemplation. I am influenced by 19th century American landscape painting and by the Buddhist concept of groundlessness. The tension between abstraction and illusionism in my work generates something familiar and yet unknown, of this world and yet also otherworldly.