In the last few years I have completed some large-scale works. The size has led me to new ideas involving the semi-aerial views of cities, rural areas and industrial structures. Adaptation to obstacles, either concrete or intellectual, influences the ingenuity and form of all of the above. The conflicting objectives of these systems often cause rupture, decay, and adaptation as well as transgressions of an environmental or ethical nature. These are themes that are evolving slowly in my painting and the form they take is not a literal, documentary one. A landscape is emerging in which detailed organic forms collide with more abstract shapes reminiscent of industrial production. The structures in the paintings seem to be the manifestation of a plan but they conflict with other elements to produce a convoluted rerouting. Crops of black and white blocks have sprung up resembling toys, edible confections, or small cities. I like the ambiguity of these objects and they way they flip in and out of the three-dimensional world. The circle of objects they purport to represent is widening. Sources and influences for these images include classical Asian painting, children’s board and computer games, and 14th Century European painting. The references to these things may be distorted and obscure when incorporated into my painting.
I think of my paintings primarily as landscapes. At first glance the subjects appear to be monumental forms such as prairies, forests and mountains. Upon closer inspection they could be smaller, more manageable things, such as objects on a blanket or figures on a rug. This ambiguity of scale is important to me and has led to the merging of landscape overviews with their tabletop sources in industrial, urban and rural planning.
The countless small repetitive brushstrokes of these paintings describe forms that are prone to collapse and mutation. The use of perishable materials such as grass, bushes, and sticks to represent more permanent structures such as canals, tunnels, and buildings is an attempt to create an ambiguous sense of time. They blend objects that vanish from one season to the next with those that may take hundreds or thousands of years to disappear. Mounds of dirt, trees, and tunnels made of hedges interact with each other to bring about new detours and chaos. Waterways twist, converge, and become stymied. The heaps of sticks inhabiting many of the paintings, suggest former structures and past seasons.
Apparently calm, these landscapes nevertheless convey an awareness of events both natural and political, some of them cataclysmic, that have come to shape any place. Landscapes can conceal the sites of atrocities. They are the surfaces that bear the brunt of human interference and they evolve in a way that is out of our control. These paintings are about the shifting relationship between place and circumstance.