My work takes place in the intersection of art-historical ideas and the concrete place and time in which I live.

Moving to a sunbelt, high-tech American boomtown amid its largest suburban expansion to date, I was startled by the perseverance of a mentality of conquest. I became interested in the history of landscape (drawing, prints, watercolor, photography, painting), how the genre reflects the possession of real estate, and how it perversely appears and reappears in the wake of expansion and destruction, all by means of an idea of nature as “other” and
unchanging. This irony has fueled my work since 1999.

At that time I began using ink and watercolor wash drawings as a reference to pre-photographic methods of documenting foreign places, animals, people, customs. I also began to depict animals, often appearing to approach or acknowledge the viewer, in a series sardonically titled “Rivals”. I see the animals as personifying nature – as projections of vulnerability, otherness, and purity. The drawings were made on panels prepared with an absorbent ground, with forms emerging into sculptural physicality out of atmospheric transparency.

The most recent wash drawings of deer and elk focus on the gesture of the organically growing antler. Forms have become imaginary, interlaced in a pattern; the colors are the acid or synthetic cousins of earth hues. Sometimes the forms reveal themselves to be in the arrested gesture of interlocking animals. In these I like the co-presence of sensitive touch, luminosity, graceful form with the violence of the gesture, of the situation.