Seeking Solace
My work responds to the natural world by exploring the relationship of personal history, landscape, digital image, and recollection. I use this process for personal reflection and as a means of examining identity, trauma, anxiety, addiction, transformation and loss.
I begin my process by taking cell phone pictures, through the windows of moving cars, trains, and buses. My recent work includes source material taken at a residency where I add a hiking point of view. Documenting and archiving my movement through landscape represents a literal and emotional experience, which facilitates my painting process.
Using the cell phone photos as source material, I depict space, light, color, and form seen through movement. Turning the paintings, I work from two directions. Vertical and horizontal drips give a sense of motion, blur forms, and build space. In addition, I have recently implemented a layering process using masking fluid, repeating the procedure multiple times to further deconstruct form.
In previous work, I simplify the reflections of lenses and windows into geometric shapes layering the translucent forms over organic forms. The work is a view of the exterior world through the layers of lenses used to pursue postable images substituting for the actual experience of the natural world. Next, I change to a view of the outside world through the car window, framed by the car interior. Nature is not boundless as it collides with an interior world, and transformation becomes a theme. Currently, my work turns towards an emotional, interior view of my journey in nature experienced during a residency in Newfoundland as I seek to process life events. Investigating those emotions through a psychological perspective of the landscape takes on new layers of meaning as the lockdown occurs upon my return from Newfoundland and a global pandemic shuts down our exterior worlds.