EDITION INFORMATION

All of my work is based on landscape imagery I collect while rummaging around in the woods with a hardy but cheap point-and-shoot digital camera. My paintings are usually large or very small and are all oil on canvas or panel. I create my work in the studio, referencing the photographs I take and download onto my laptop screen. Never having been one for plein air painting, I find working in the studio from a photo allows me to have enough distance from the original scene to allow me to impose more of my own psychology and color onto the raw material of the collected image.

In this piece, I am exploring themes that are common to all my works. I am interested in the contrasting anxiety and relief that occurs from pairing areas of dense hyper-detail with areas of breathe-ability. Snippets of saturated under-painting (what I like to call "air holes") peek out and are left raw. Heavily painted areas of density and deformity creep in as well, creating a final puzzle-locking composition that confuses the appearance of flatness and space, invented color and natural color, and ugliness and beauty.

Hermaphrodite was so named because of a curious and unexpected phenomenon that appeared while painting the main pine tree trunk. The source image was taken in Glacier National Park, Montana, in 2006 while trudging through a muddy fog-blanketed trail in the Two Medicine region. This trail coincidentally was a sacred area used for vision quests by the Blackfoot Indians.