Artist Statement
My paintings begin with landscape and with the physical experience of moving through it. Geography and the specificity of place are important to me, but I am less interested in describing a landscape than in what happens to it after I have passed through it. The painting becomes part of a journey between the hike and the studio—between direct experience and what remains through memory, sensation and time.
Years spent walking long distances through remote landscapes fundamentally changed the way I see. On foot, space unfolds slowly and sequentially. Attention shifts between immense distances and intimate details: a mountain range, the architecture of a plant, changing light, an unexpected color, the rhythm of repeated forms, a storm, a good day, a bad day. Back in the studio, these experiences are fragmented, compressed and reconstructed rather than literally depicted.
I build paintings through an accumulation of observation, memory and invention. Recognizable elements—mountains, plants, desert forms, trees and horizons—move between gestural passages and more deliberate, constructed shapes. Color departs from the observed landscape and becomes a way of reorganizing it, collapsing distance and creating a different kind of geography.
The resulting paintings exist somewhere between the place I walked through and the place that emerges through painting. They hover between landscape and abstraction, retaining traces of their geographic origins while becoming something remembered, altered and newly imagined.