Artist Statement
Born in Berkeley, CA
MFA Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
BFA University of Texas, Austin, TX
Environmental Realism.
My work concerns the ever changing effects man has on nature and in turn nature has on man.
Man clears away nature to construct buildings that nature fights to reclaim. What remains are the echoes of human history. There is an offset of what some people think is good and others believe is evil. The history is the story behind the decaying structures. These stories change over time just as my paintings change just as people change. The history can lead to the creations of myths that define chaos and order. We fight to hold on to tradition in a rapidly changing world that is being defined by our fast paced lives. We try to use science to solve our problems and to find meaning. Often the answers are obvious if we just look back into our own history and nature but we don't have the time to listen.
I have always been fascinated by the aged surfaces of manmade buildings such as the old wood tobacco barns and abandoned homes out in the countryside where I use to live and still visit while riding around on horseback. I find beauty in the rusted cars and tractors I run across in sheds and fields. When I am in the city I wonder what stories are told about this cycle of man and nature that I see played out in the crumbling cement sidewalks, old buildings covered with layers and layers of peeling paint and by the weeds and vines slowly tearing down fences. This cycle is represented in my work by the many layers of paint through which you can see glimpses of previous layers of paint and drawing. The bits and pieces of drawings that I add to the layers of paint are made up of my personal vocabulary of symbols and stylized geometry of both nature and the hand of man. For us there is a story that played out in a time of innocence and ignorance. That story only becomes history if someone tells it. The history is preserved like the rings of a tree or sediment in the earth. A structure or an object might be weathered and falling apart but we can still find great beauty in it. We see it for what it is today and we see what we remember about it from our past. The same nature that fights to reclaim us we so desperately fight to preserve. In the end nature will win and there will be no one to listen.