I have always had a strong connection to the land. How I approach and interpret life has been greatly influenced by literature, traditional landscape painting, and contemporary art and issues. I see the landscape as a reflection of an individual’s interior landscape and as a manifestation of a society’s history, values, and direction.

As a painter I peer over my work like a figure studying a map with numerous forking paths, features, and points of interest. I think of my paintings as passages in a novel, locations on a map, without a supporting narrative to form a cohesive linear story. They create a world composed of disjointed moments. Whether it is a mountain top view of an expansive fall landscape scarred by bad decisions, an abandoned coal breaker, a hunting cabin, a stonewall with a portal to another place, or a dense forest floor, they exist in a world that is in constant flux, a world that is threatened by man and nature. Our history of exploitations has altered the land. Water is black, the ground has split open, and the foliage has mutated revealing colors that are more synthetic than natural. Everything appears to be unstable and on hollow ground. Figures appear and vanish. They are silhouettes or ghostly inhabitants that are consumed by the surrounding landscape. It is an environment at odds with itself, the foundation unstable and composed of polarities. It attracts and it repels, it is painting and photography.

Painting and photography are at odds with one another. I see painting as a warm medium; it invites the viewer to investigate the surface and contemplate how the palette and paint application inform subject and content. My paintings often have painterly moments that are thick and gestural. Sometimes I use a palette knife to apply and scrape away while in other areas the handling can be brushy or soft and blended. Initially one may think this style does not lend itself to the cool mechanical qualities of the photograph but the camera and photograph become my sketchpad and painting surface. Like Caspar David Frederick or Thomas Cole I set out in pursuit of a subject, but instead of sketching a particular vista I use a large format camera to document. I often manipulate the scene prior to shooting and then alter it further in Photoshop. This manipulation is no different than Thomas Cole creating the perfect waterfall composition by adding elements to his preliminary drawings, nor is it different than a contemporary painter gathering source material or creating sketches for a final piece. In my works the painterly passages meet and coexist with the crisp imagery of the photograph and its cut edge. Oftentimes the paint will come onto the photograph, eroding and consuming the line between the two, while in other areas the photograph will rise above the paint. It is in this interplay between the two mediums, in this tension, that my work surfaces.