These paintings address changing perceptions toward landscape, the environment and our place in the world.
Initially I was struck by the sense of permanence, vastness and grandeur of traditional landscape painting. In contrast, our contemporary vision is usually momentary; (a view from a car, plane, train or film), fragmentary or distracted. Traditional depictions of the land and sea display a sense of power, stability, strength, a place to be conquered or conquer. Our dialogue around the environment now is of fragility and impermanence, destruction and loss. Our views of the passing world are frequently distorted from the glare of a window, a flash of artificial light, the editing of a photograph, political divisiveness.
It is in this procession that nature becomes metaphor for mind. The paintings begin to reflect less on a physical place than as nature as a conduit to an increasingly disordered and disorienting world view. Place and perspective continue to disassociate from a given Image. Natural colors lie uncomfortably next to neon. My intent is to mirror the discord in these realities within the structure and history of painting.
The Disrupted Landscapes are a series of paintings inspired by differences in how the land and landscape painting are experienced now versus historically. In them perspectives don’t necessarily lead to a single vanishing point, images from different picture planes exist simultaneously and unexplained flotsam appears much like the blips created by digital disturbance. These landscapes acknowledge the history of traditional landscape painting while not fulfilling those expected visual outcomes.
