I am engaged in a dialogue surrounding the relevance of creating the handmade in a culture defined by the digital. I am interested in navigating the boundaries between these worlds in order to become immersed in a new kind of visual language that sometimes contradicts itself.

In these paintings, I explore possibilities for creating space, implying virtual form, suggesting form, activating the space through movement or tension, and also allowing subtle marks to create energies. These marks sometimes dramatically influence the direction or meaning of the piece. The marks and lines can suggest the movement of particles under the influence of various natural forces such as gravity, wind, the geometric ordering of nature and the changing structures of the thought process.

My recent paintings have been an investigation into the work of Northern European landscape painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and the use of the “sublime” landscape. An intensified Romantic concentration on Nature and its phenomena may imply, in fact, a kind of alienation from Nature. I am interested in how the artist, through observation and contemplation, may address the desire to make contact with Nature again. In the Romantic view, the act of perception places the viewer in a state of potentiality and this is essentially what my painting practice is about.

Rooted in the traditional practices of painting and printmaking, my methods of production explicitly push the limits of simple materials. I have felt a need to get out from under the confines of traditional media while still examining a traditional two-dimensional surface, to better understand the potential relationship of my media to a specific content. The time consuming process of sanding and scraping becomes an opportunity to think about the work at hand. The repetition of motion and mark, sanded and rubbed, become like the repetitive waves of daily life, ultimately resisting any one particular read.