Artist Statement

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My studio practice is dedicated to creating mixed-media paintings exploring the natural environment and its various forms of representation as a means of visualizing real and psychological space. These works are painting-based, but also incorporate photographic imagery printed on fabric, which is substrate and sometimes surface. Printed imagery is generated from found photos, art references, and field-based photography. Shifts in materials and methods create a geography that evokes a simultaneity of internal and external experience. The back and forth between print and painting creates a dialogical interplay; a kind of visual call and response.

 

These works are landscapes and mindscapes that unfold through a set of environments: mountains, coast, urban, rural, art-historical. They speak to a need to make sense of, to organize multiple types of experience and find beauty and balance. Painting with the addition of photographic and digital materials brings the work into a discourse between traditional and contemporary studio methodologies, a position that is philosophically critical to me as a contemporary artist who also embraces traditional artistic practices.

 

The materials are not only the means, but also themselves contain their own mysterious vibrancy; their own voice. So, paradoxically, the very nature of these works is entropic, even as they try to capture and order. I am endlessly reminded that everything, paint, fabric, all material has a stored energy, an intrinsic turbulence.

 

Inside there is paint, fabric, art books, photos, thread and post-it notes. Outside is the landscape.  Outside gets inside and the other way around.