ARTIST STATEMENT

The landscape is a universal symbolic image, thick with narration and metaphor, which is why it has been a canonized subject matter for so much of art history. Particularly today at a time when the natural land is disappearing at an unprecedented rate, the landscape becomes an even more poignant image to work with.

As an American exploring issues of identity, memory and the passage of time, I have chosen to paint primarily through a lens from the first American art movement, The Hudson River School of Landscape Painting, to parallel the subconsciously romantic eye of a collective American culture. Rather than depicting a site-specific locale, my focus has been to evoke a sense of place inherent within the painting process. These 'inner landscapes' are invented, and often referenced from photographs taken during travels. Whether real or imagined, they are infused with the influence from Dutch Master, Tonalist, and Chinese Painting.

Although produced on a single wooden panel, these ethereal landscapes are often juxtaposed with segments of aqueous color fields whose energetic swirls of paint act as commentary for the landscapes, like the chorus in a Greek play. The crisp, hard edges separating the landscapes from the color fields command a sense of order in an otherwise unabashed painterly surface. With two or three sections of the panel competing for attention, the painting creates multiple focal points. The primary narrative elements- the path, the moody sky, endless sea, and isolated trees- adjacent to the secondary abstracted elements are the icons used to form my language of expression.

While each painting may have individual meanings, the body of work focuses on the journey of life that includes notions of memory, identity and passage of time. The artistic process used to explore these subjects is reflected through the application of paint onto panel. Just as memories emerge in and out of our sub-consciousness, contorting into surreality, I paint intuitively, pouring washes over previous layers leaving traces from an earlier generation peering through a gauze-like screen of paint. One is confronted by these contradictory layers that make references to memory; articulating through painterly abstraction that make no other reference to an existing place other than an inherent emotional position inside the psyche.

The paintings are meant to explore levels of meaning as they connect our personal experiences to a world severely distanced from our-selves. My interest lies in understanding what is at the core of human nature- desire, curiosity, need for love, acceptance, and hope. It is narrating a personal archeology of the id while simultaneously relating to other people what is timelessly universal.