I am a landscape painter infused with chemicals. I create paintings and drawings that depict a fluidity between the figure, the synthetic, and the natural environment. I am interested in emotional adaptability, and my own willingness to seek the sublime in an augmented “nature”. I often build my paintings in thin glazes of oil color, attempting to capture light and temperature as dutifully as earlier masters of American landscape painting. However, as I am focused on creating convincing naturalistic spaces, I am also focused on negating these illusionistic elements with line, color, and imagery that reveal the contrivance of the diegetic space.

In several of my paintings I conceal parts of the painted surface with tarpaulin. As polyvalent as a tarp can be in a landscape, one use of particular note is for fencing of development and construction. The diaphanous border between myself and “nature” is brought into sharp relief when confronted with such a membrane. I also make drawings which at first glance appear to be sincere charcoal studies of tall grass or weeds, though these drawings are made with BBQ charcoal, fire starter wax, dog shampoo, and Miracle-Gro potting mix. The difference is often only understood by encountering the list of materials. This inability to perceive difference relates to my experience working as a landscaper, building a pond and two waterfalls in the garden of a residence. The birds who come to bathe in this water feature are unaware of the artificiality of its genesis.

I am innately drawn to the rainbow shimmer of boat gasoline on the surface of a lake on the Monday of a long weekend. I am fascinated by the phenomenon of a bonfire burning intensely the color of whatever soda can is thrown in. I imagine the aesthetic impact of multiple types of landscape forced onto the same surface. Though there may be no wilderness in my work, there remains an uncontrolled natural world. Where earlier painters attempted to depict the great uninhabited expanse, I am depicting the infusion of this hybridized nature back into the body and mind. Waste leaves only to return.

Much of the imagery that I use comes from my upbringing in the Burned Over District of Upstate NY. This region was known for a wave of apocalyptic Christian movements in the early Nineteenth Century and was also the birthplace of Spiritualism and the American fascination with seances and spirits. This coincided with the reign of the Hudson River School painters who were uniting the ideas of landscape with divinity and exceptionalism. Unable to fully extricate myself from the ghosts of these seductive histories, I am left with a deep superstition that remains formless, individualized and connected to the act of painting itself. The objects I create are my attempts to find the visual language of familiarity and acceptance in an augmented natural world.