My paintings are built from layered drawings and glazes, observed contour, and invention. I continually negotiate each element’s relationship to nameable forms. Color describes light and heat, from the sun or small chemical processes. Texture and edge become topographical contour and bodily membranes that merge or contain. Several rounds of destruction, with solvent, sandpaper, or layers of paint, drastically reframe the elements that remain and make way for new forms. The compositions are arenas, conscious of the edge of the substrate as it houses perspective. 

 

My current work engages 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. 

 

The paintings lead the eye from somewhere close enough to touch towards an inscrutable distance. Desire, or at least momentum, is paired with impossibility. This longing, a carrot on a string, may approach a biological survival instinct that can activate the life of painted forms.