All of my work is based on landscape imagery I collect while rummaging around in the woods with a hardy, inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera. Subjects include wild areas in which I have recently spent time, including Wyoming, Montana and Upstate New York. My paintings range from the very large to the very small and are all oil on canvas or panel. I create my work in the studio, referencing the photographs I take and download onto my laptop screen. I find working in the studio from a photo allows me to have enough distance from the original scene to allow me to impose more of my own psychology and color onto the raw material of the collected image.
In my work as a whole, I am interested in exploring the in-between states of painting. I enjoy the contrasting feelings of anxiety and relief that occur from pairing areas of dense hyper-detail with areas of light breathe-ability. Tree branches twist and writhe, color turns acidic, and sky flattens to meet form and then deepens back into space again. Snippets of saturated under-painting peek out and are left raw. Animism, personification and deformity creep in as well, creating a final puzzle-locking composition that confuses the appearance of flatness and space, invented color and natural color, and dark menace and sparkling beauty.
