In my studio are several elementary geography books from the 19th and 20th centuries; Potter’s New Elementary Geography, (1888),Barne’s Complete Geography, (1895), Our world in Space and Time (1960), to list a few. I often look through these books, marveling how a singular image attempted to represent entire continents, universes of information about climate zones, topography, culture, and the planets. One single black and white engraved image was surrogate for the wonder of seeing the Northern Lights or knowing South America. And this finite collection of images from a single book, had to power the imagination, and sustain a child through many years. Now, we are flooded with images that slide across every bright and shiny screen. They all look equally important. Do we look twice? Do they sustain us? Yes and no.
I paint the landscape; real and imagined, because it offers the moving experience of positioning ones’ place in the world. Large enough to create an immersive experience, these paintings offer familiarity and sometimes strangeness; a place apart. Ways of seeing and understanding ourselves have been influenced by ideas of what constitutes order and beauty in the natural world. In our day, we have limited access to the deep patterns of nature. We acknowledge environmental awareness as subtext, but that seems to put us further afield. Landscape, Nature, offers us a contemplated reality; no matter how beautiful or bleak the landscape may appear, we are aware of an overriding something else- something fugitive. My paintings address this ‘something else- something fugitive- contemplated- reality’. In the bright elementary sunrise and in the gloaming, these paintings suggest the world is a malleable place. The night can be a cloak of revelations as in Radiant Night or an endless loop of woe as in Dark Engine, where the engine of night combines with that of the mind to create a strange and treacherous landscape. The realism my work presents is more about how things feel rather than verisimilitude, the possibility of re-enchantment with the natural world. These paintings are about visual ways of knowing; ourselves, nature, bioluminescence, the shaggy southern landscape, things seen and unseen, patterns and signals within the language of reeds, grasses, and things that glow.
