The Great Lakes hold nearly twenty percent of the world's fresh surface water. They are ancient, vast, and too often taken for granted by those of us lucky enough to live along their shores.

Great Lakes, Greater Responsibilities is an ongoing series of oil paintings exploring the shorelines and waters of all five Great Lakes, a personal pursuit to know each lake intimately through the act of painting it. Begun in 2024, the series is as much a journey as it is a body of work, moving from lake to lake, shore to shore, seeking the places where water meets land in the Great Lakes basin.

This first pass through the lakes is one of calm. These are paintings of still mornings, quiet horizons, and the particular quality of light that settles over fresh water. Four lakes have been painted so far, with the fifth on the horizon.

But the lakes are not always calm. Future work in this series will pursue the same waters in motion, the storms, the chop, the raw power that anyone who has stood on a Great Lakes shore in November already knows. The quiet of this first pass makes that reckoning more meaningful.

Great Lakes, Greater Responsibilities is a long-term commitment to these waters, to this region, and to the conversation about what we owe the largest freshwater system on earth.