Statement
My work focuses upon the landscape, and more specifically,
the rural American landscape. These paintings propose
the rural landscape as highly sophisticated, sensuous,
and troubled. The deeply embedded questions in
this work explore ideas of rural space, and the contemporary
articulation of a physical relationship with the land.
Challenging conventions of traditional landscape painting,
this work overturns the panoramic view as the primary
mode of representing and conceptualizing the landscape.
The landscape is depicted as active, assertive and sculptural,
rather than timeless, recessive, and passive.
In keeping
with traditions of landscape painting, many elements
in the work come from on-site observation drawings
and studies of plants, natural and rural land forms,
weather, and water. The emphasis on naturalism
and observation is combined with research and source
imagery from the internet.
The resulting
abstractions of space, form, and scale articulate a contemporary
experience of the land--both first hand, and through
remote, decontextualized digital imagery. Simultaneously
hallucinatory and historicized, these paintings depict
a rural landscape that is a collision of memory and tactile
experience, bound together by specificity. The sometimes
harmonius, sometimes monstrous symbiosis of human necessity
and nature shapes new, monumental forms out of the land
that are both disorienting and poetic. |
