2022
Real & Remembered
This new collection of paintings has come out of a season of learning to trust myself in and out the studio. Impulsive color, decisive marks, & reverence for the landscape close to home — all of my favorite things are here. You’ll find two different segments of work coming together in this collection, including oil on canvas plein air paintings and studio experimentations with flashe paint on yupo paper. I'm fascinated by how they feel so connected — two bodies of work built side by side, but separated by medium and process. They've been in conversation with one another all summer. Shapes found en plein air became distorted versions of themselves in the studio, and the freedom that comes with working from imagination followed me out to the trail. I can’t help but wonder if these boundaries of process—plein air versus studio painting—are fuzzier than I assume.
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100 Day Project
A collection of observational 4” x 4” gouache paintings completed from February to June.
A Solo Game of Telephone
The paintings in this collection were born in the studio from photos and memory. As a seasonal plein air painter, I’ve always had a begrudging relationship with working indoors during the cold winter months. When I work en plein air I invent color and shape in an effort to simplify the excess of visual information, but in the studio I invent for entirely different reasons. A photo of a landscape is a distortion; edges have been cropped and color drained. Forms are flattened and fixed in place. I approach this attenuated version of the landscape with generous detachment, making use of memory, sketches, and improvisation, often in conflict with each other, to satiate my need for disorder. In creating these winter landscapes, I sought to bring the seductiveness of plein air painting into the studio, to respond to conflicting records of the landscape and organize them into a single representation driven by color and mark making. The complicated landscape is simplified, then re-complicated, and simplified again – a solo game of telephone.
Winter Nocturnes
These nocturnes have been born in yet another pandemic winter. In these long months made of short days, finding powerful color just before the sun sets becomes an exciting hunt. A sliver of light on the drive home. The glow of snow at the edge of day. The rich darks of backlit tree lines. These little paintings represent moments of solace and the awe of finding powerful visual moments in a season when the landscape can feel overwhelmingly gray.
