Artist Introduction

My paintings depict landscapes that are neither true to life nor far from it. They are paintings of the landscape being experienced and by extension recorded and preserved. Each painting captures the whole of their surroundings, acting as a net catching light as it moves through the trees. I root my work in the natural world as a “plein air” painter, often utilizing found materials to scrape and manipulate the surface of the canvas to create marks and textures unique to the site. I want to imbue my paintings with the essence of the landscape to help understand my place within it.

I view each painting as an active interaction with the analogue world, filled with marks that mirror the movements and sounds of the environment. The leaf that scrapes the canvas as it drops, the sun as it descends below the tree line, the sounds of frogs and cicadas– all this informs the artwork, putting process and immediate history into each step of the painting. I work on flat canvases that have exposed torn edges – like a swatch taken from nature, threads hanging loose, its silhouette not exactly square. These tactile paintings dry slowly exposed to the night air, allowing the dew to keep the paint wet for hours. As a result, the paint is slowly absorbed into the weave of the canvas, eventually visually resembling dyed cloth. The paint handling is defined and colorful, relying on gravity and chemistry to render these abstracted landscapes and botanicals. In recent works, I use photo-reactive pigments to capture the sun’s light directly onto the surface of the painting. The finished works are a sum of actions, a thicket of brushstrokes suspended in time – created in collaboration with the natural cycles of each place that they are created in.

It is my hope that by traveling to and painting within the forests of the Southern United States, I can work with the natural rhythms of a complex and storied landscape to create artworks that highlight the subtle energies of each place. I’m searching for the parts of the landscape that can’t be AI prompted, that can’t be easily replicated, and to find power in the unique natural world surrounding the places I choose to work in. I want viewers to be able to go on this journey with me and travel through the brushstrokes to experience a small part of these hidden places to gain appreciation of the slow cycles of the world in their daily lives.