Description

A walk through the forest offers a return to stillness, a quieting that allows an interior world to emerge. In my landscape series, each painting opens into that space—a suspended moment shaped by experiences in the dense forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Pacific Northwest. Memory transforms these environments into living, improvisational stages, extending the experience into the studio. Rooted in a process-driven approach, each surface is built through accumulation and disruption. Working in oil on canvas-wrapped panels, I alternate between broad application and selective removal—layering, sanding, scraping, and glazing to create depth and a translucent, skin-like surface. Brushstrokes and etched lines activate the surface, forming web-like structures that both describe and dissolve the landscape. Through this interplay, intricate, lace-like patterns emerge, at times resembling filigree. Each painting is structured through a network of lines that weave and tangle, forming a dynamic framework beneath the image. These abstract elements emphasize the painting as a physical object while holding tension with its illusionistic space. Drawing from the visual language of devotional painting, the work carries a quiet sense of reverence, while its surface complexity and material presence situate it within a contemporary context. Echoing Philip Guston’s observation that “painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again,” the work is driven by a continual return to the act of making—an effort to give form to an inner world through the language of paint.