Deconstructing Landscapes
Empathy
"We look down on every body"
Change is a constant, as much as the clouds shift daily so do our thoughts and emotions. In this series I'm exploring modes of expression by manipulating color and skies.
In these paintings, much like life, the level of success you face is not proportionate to the work you put in. Meet the paint where it's at.
Snowmen painted onto shovels, the smell of funnel-cake, a small collection of people are wandering around and thoughtfully observing the old jail-house before loudly announcing “It’s Miller-time.” When I think of home, that is what comes to mind. A history that can be traced maybe three or four generations and people just living for today. The long drives from town to town just to see one another are always lined with old barn-doors screaming phrases like “live, laugh, love” and distance trees that never really seem to get any closer. But there is also the profound sense of loss and degradation, an underlying anger and mistrust. The rust-belt that runs through the south and into the Midwest is filled with good and caring people who have lived through watching their livelihoods being stripped away.
The voice I work with is one that has come from a place that has experienced such loss. The tragedy of watching as an entire city slowly falls apart but also the joy of watching it come back together. Growth doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a lot of work and vulnerability. Empathy is not always intrinsic, people suffer for it and because of the lack of it. It is impossible to ignore the collective scream that is humanity right now.
My response to this memory and this experience, is to have to paint. My depictions are like memories themselves, all real spaces but compressed and rearranged to form an experience. Looming over-head are the ever present thoughts and feelings that impressed upon me by such spaces. Perhaps the most important aspect to me, is the color and the raw emotion that it can evoke. That there are places that are so very real and yet without persistent presence, they are reduced. Gods occupy some of the panels as they guide and loom over personal detriment or achievement but always in reaction to the composition itself. The tiniest of figures walk by, unaware, and on with their lives.
By sharing these scenes I am providing a space to reflect. A place to see and be seen. We are our own first observers and we are all connected by a shared experience that is thought. Ron Padgett says it better than I ever could in his poem, “Art Lessons” where he states:
“...Landscape is a window through which you see what you thought.”
Well, here’s my window.
Artist
Statement
Empathy
"We look down on every body"
Change is a constant, as much as the clouds shift daily so do our thoughts and emotions. In this series I'm exploring modes of expression by manipulating color and skies.
In these paintings, much like life, the level of success you face is not proportionate to the work you put in. Meet the paint where it's at.
Drawings
Examples or studies usually for my paintings
variety of approaches and materials
Watercolors
So many things
I absolutely love watercolors, they need their own section. If I'm not working with Oils, you can definitely find me scratching away at a block of some Arches or Canson. This will be much less structured but I'm sure you will find it entertaining.
Photography
Little lenses with big ideas
At the beginning of the pandemic I took my time and learned a few new processes. I would extrude these small landscapes from clay and photograph them with a camera that I had built from scratch. An astounding learning experience and one that I will never forget. That camera is, in fact, used to photograph many of the larger paintings as well.
