Pittsburgh Artist Registry

Artist Statement

I make work that explores the interaction between the landscape and the psyche. As living things, we are shaped by the land where we are born and by the lands where we live our lives. As creatures with language, we attach emotional and symbolic meaning to landscapes of spectacular sunrises, brooding skies, and majestic mountains. I am interested in the extent to which what we see in the landscape mirrors our interior state of mind.

My work posits landscape painting as portrait—terrain as entity. I use video and paint to trigger visceral recognition of unknown or subconscious places. My recent relocation to Pittsburgh is a return to the landscape of my childhood. The steep hills, verdant green overgrowth, industrial decay and winding promise of the rivers are deeply imprinted in my imagination.

Liminality, a threshold between two conditions or states of being, is an important metaphor in my paintings. Motifs of mountain, water and cloud become characters for my exploration of Form/Formlessness, Time/Timelessness, Stasis/Flux. I think of my paintings as existing in the liminal space between waking and dreaming.

My process oscillates between the algorithmic and the stochastic. I often utilize an underlying set of rules to initiate a work; however, resolution of a piece is both emergent and intuitive. I am very interested in exploiting the physical properties of my medium. Complex color and vibratory color relationships are also primary concerns. I like to think of the parallels between color and music, light waves and sound waves, and am agitated when a painting that I am working on does not sound quite right. For me, there is almost an audible snap when the color is resolved.

My most recent work the Ground Figure series investigates the mutability of meaning by solving the painting along two axes: along a horizontal center line (landscape format), and along a vertical axis (portrait format). With a 90-degree clockwise or counterclockwise rotation of the canvas, the ground transforms into figure—figure dissolves into ground. This change in orientation of the canvas invites interpretation of the work from varied perspectives.

The MindForms series isa second ongoing body of works on paper inspired by anonymous Rajasthani tantric meditation paintings. The quiet power of these paintings has compelled me to seek to create my own exploration of this method.