These paintings are from a series titled Earthworks and are inspired by the land art movement of the mid-twentieth century, and the landscapes of the Hudson River School. Two elements of the American identity are the land itself, and the perception that the land was unpopulated, free from history, and therefore a blank canvas on which a person could express their ideas. It seems to me that there is a connection between the earthworks of Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and Michael Heizer, and the grand nineteenth century landscapes of Frederic Church, and other Hudson River school painters.

These paintings are part of a body of work centered on my studio practice, a sanctuary for reflection. Informed by the example of eighteenth and nineteenth century French paintings of artists in their studios, I paint the workspace of my studio, arranging paintings and sculptural objects to reveal aspects of my experience. Through physically connecting my body in space via formal relationships, touching and painting, my work emphasizes a human scale, painting-driven connection to the roots of my own symbolic narrative and its specific culture, history and architecture.

The American city is the starting point for my art. The open stretch of Lake Michigan from the overlooking bluffs in Milwaukee may have fueled an attraction to the shifting light on the spread-out concrete plains of Indianapolis. The work stands between abstraction and representation. Opposing qualities drive these paintings: the order of the compositions against the seeming disorder of the gestural moments, their stillness against the implication of movement. I want them to be accessible and blunt records of contemporary visual history.

Infused with lighthearted arbitrariness, my paintings tell amusing anecdotes about love and affection in an often cold and hostile world. Mostly, the work percolates life’s imperfections. The paintings do not take issues of decorum all that seriously, refusing to separate matters of taste from larger questions about “good behavior.” Showing all sorts of sensuous events, from the casual encounter to highly formalized lovemaking (and everything in between), the works are miniaturized schemas of love, desire, pleasure, tragedy, and cosmic disorder.