SOME PLACE, NOT BERLIN

Traveling back and forth across America, I observed the changes in landscape and architecture from region to region. Places have always punctuated my experience and my process as a maker. My lyrical Impressionist imagery is focused on boundaries and divisions, manmade and natural, such as rivers, bridges, fences, roads and borders. My painterly methods include stain painting and monoprinting. I use a restricted palette, boiled down to the minimal essence of colors in a location.

My work allows me to explore the environment at a particular moment and to freeze the forms that represent that moment in time, observing the degradation of land, gentrification, decline, developments and demolitions. My urbanscapes are inspired by the enigmatic, devoid of human activity, reflecting on our contemporary estrangement brought about by dormitory style suburbs and commuter cities. The process is hunting and gathering images, searching for an experience, or proof of experiences past.

These landscapes are deliberately ambiguous, allowing the viewer to call up their own memories of familiar forms. My intention is to give the viewer a sense of déjà vu, and mystification over how to reconcile befuddling familiarity. Painting requires that natural pigments are mined from the earth. Cobalt and iron oxides are extracted to the great detriment of the landscape, then processed, heated and altered in a sumptuous colorful ooze, then packaged in tubes and sold to the artist, to render the image of the landscape, drawing a connection between creation, degradation and the sublime.



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