Biography
The act of painting is self-reflective in nature. Raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, my immediate environment was in a regular state of flux and entirely consumer-driven. Hastiness in project completion always compromising dependability, storefronts would open and were promptly replaced with new ones, cellular towers erected, and homes fabricated with the façade of stability employing the cheapest labor possible.
My position as an Admission Counselor for Cornish College of the Arts requires that I travel to various parts of Washington state. Recognizing that many of these pass-through towns shared a similar strip mall landscape to that of Little Rock, I often left with an overwhelming feeling of displacement and vulnerability. As a result, for the past three years my work has been devoted to a personal reflection of landscape through the use of mixed wet and dry media on paper. Reliant on the cyclical nature of time, the landscape holds the promise of building and the compromise of erosion. Continually dotted by our patterns of impermanent, decorative structures, an affirmation of spectacle is renewed. As a painter I am particularly interested in the expansive qualities of these tropes.
Landscape interpretation, dependent on the gaze of the viewer, offers a substitution of authorship that I often attempt to address in the development of a piece. Scale, human presence, and the stir of unforeseen struggle are elements also regularly encountered in the development of these portraits.
