I work to engage the convention of landscape painting with modern revelations in ecological thinking. Considered ecologically, “landscape” becomes a teeming extension of the self, holding countless sensory and temporal experiences. It becomes indistinguishable from portraits and arrangements of fruit. Painting is as old as cultural ideas about the way humans fit into ecology: I work within this tradition as a way to question these dominant socialized perceptions. 

My paintings are built from layered glazes, observed contour, and invention. As the painting evolves I continually negotiate each element’s relationship to nameable forms. I conflate qualities of scale ranging from micro to macro, and rework edges as membranes that merge or contain. Forms open up as deep empty space and/or breath and crawl as living things. The weave of fabric and the grain of pigment are laid bare while contributing to the depth and shape of an image. 

Many questions in both painting and ecology can only be answered by conceding to ambiguity, and to the unknowability of others’ sensory life experiences. The work inhabits this kind of gray-area thinking. Alternative qualities are concurrently true; body and space; painting and real life; abstraction and representation; a brushstroke done fast, looking fast, yet frozen on the canvas. Ambiguity, suspended in a web between unreachable absolutes, lets go of the illusion that anyone sees or understands anything clearly.  

Being abstract, the work is inaccessible, just like a definitive answer to an ecological question. Desire and inaccessibility are the building blocks of longing: I search for the “Longing to inhabit” by painting living place that is both seductive and out of reach. This is a feeling I experience all the time, and view as a universal survival instinct that can activate the life of painted forms.