The paintings that I make are an exploration of nature as subject matter. The work stems from my own experiences as well as research in the areas of Romantic sublime and Chinese landscape painting. Nature’s processes serve as a metaphor for an unrelenting, uncontrollable force, bringing into question notions of will and chance. Gravity, erosion, pressure, and flow become important actions in the making of this work, ultimately serving as opposition to human will.
The paintings evolve through a process of chance and response; an act of letting go becomes symbolic for recognizing that control is only gained when there is a willingness to abandon it. This struggle, born of experience, is revealed in the marred, sanded surface, which becomes an artifact of those forces that formed it. The spaces that develop serve as an expanse through which the viewer may wander. The oppositional union of textured surfaces and illusionistic space becomes a way to use the physical as a bridge to the immaterial. The mystery involved in the study of nature serves as a way of looking and recognizing order and pattern in a seemingly random universe. It is through this study - viewing the macrocosmic within the microcosmic - that I connect with and experience the complexities of nature, recognizing that infinitude is within the minutiae.
The process that formed the work and the manner in which I respond to those processes, acts as a way of unifying will and chance. It is by embracing the accidental and responding intuitively to those events, that I become free of, and move with, those forces which cannot be controlled.