ARTIST STATEMENT

Landscape in the Postmodern –

Landscape – or more properly, the relationship of the body to its (often natural) environment –has always been an important part of my work. Since relocating from a very urban loft in Chicago to an old farmhouse in rural Georgia the idea of straightforward landscape painting seems increasingly strange. Whatever “I” may or may not be it is certainly embedded in this complex ecological environment and no longer has the luxury of considering itself in any sense separate. Thus the illusion of observer/recorder is just that and is replaced by an ever-increasing awareness of dissolution of ego and interconnectedness and intimacy with the whole living and non-living system. It is a delicately balanced relationship and the rules seem to be always in flux –both here in my little woods and in the world as a whole – just as the self is forever in a fluid state of becoming and non-existence.

Here, in my barn/studio and in the open air, I try to work with and within this environment and protect it while doing no conscious harm, all the while allowing these experiences to embed themselves in my psyche and emerge in the struggled-with stuff of paint. The wildness of nature and the irrationality, reverie, and fugue-states of painting are a heady and daunting mix – but an essential one.