ARTIST STATEMENT

What is our wilderness? Is it really tranquil, majestic or pure? The history of our country is deeply rooted in the out-of –doors and the various intense attitudes with which it carries.

I paint with contradicting perceptions and ideas, which I cannot entirely explain to myself. I find myself caught between detailed certainty and mysterious generalizations. Being in the wilderness, I find myself in awe of its sublime and intimate wonder, yet uneasy of potential and mystery whether apprehensive or real. Rooted in the pathos of making the invisible visible, much of my art ends up as an aesthetic-fictional response to conditions, circumstances, and reflections of interpersonal dialog ever increasingly compounded by probabilities, the unforeseeable, contradictions, ironies and error.

My work evolves primarily from within my own indoor working space. Using my own photographs as sketches, I can “cut and paste” as I draw out small compositions to ponder over particular forms. I can construct my own specific window of the world. The design of my paintings or drawings more than likely signify a traditional landscape. Yet, upon other moments it is as-if I observe conditions in my work I had not considered before, which seem to take me beyond mere actualities into a different context. The work constitutes multiple viewpoints, bringing together forms from entirely different geographic locations. As far as I know these scenes do not exist in nature.

As my paintings develop, my interpretations and responses become vague and questionable. As I reference otherwise inanimate, recognizable forms, they begin to deviate and suggest misunderstood, enigmatic, and irrational experiences, but which are approximate and somehow proper to my life.

I search to see and use elements, shapes of boulders for example, that could be interpreted as immobile, opaque, solid, and timeless. The interaction of water, interpreted as the transparent, fluid, an eroding force, and the temporary. The I-beams serve as a foundation, and encroachment, an imposition for an implementation for future structural activity or preventative maintenance. Furthermore, these elements are in turn, shaped by the random, the sometimes calculable, ephemeral natural forces. The relations between the concepts of the recognizable, the physical spatial intervals of these relations are as important as the objects themselves.  

The way I communicate with my environment reflects my own world. As-if the way I paint and draw builds a perceptual frame or reference to germinate visual conjunctions reflexive of a process of how I perceive who I am, and learning about the world around me.