Artist Statement for Murphy to Manteo—An Artist’s Scenic Journey

I have been painting the North Carolina landscape for over 40 years. The current “Murphy to Manteo—An Artist’s Scenic Journey” body of work began to take shape as a series of North Carolina landscape paintings more than a decade ago. The project evolved in part from an interest in serial landscape images sparked by living and teaching at a university in Japan. Shortly after my return, at a time when I was exhibiting North Carolina landscape paintings in the lieutenant governor’s office, I began to see the entire state as potential subject matter. As Murphy to Manteo has become synonymous with “all of North Carolina,” the ultimate objective of the project is to produce 100 large-scale oil paintings, as diverse as the North Carolina landscape itself, forming a comprehensive portrait of the scenic landscape along the 563 miles of the US 64 corridor. I set out to expand the scale and complexity of my vision for post-abstract Southern realist painting and create an epic panorama from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Outer Banks.