On Imaginary Landscapes
Within us lives all the places we have visited, all the hills we have climbed and the waters we have tread. Our entire existence unfolds within the context of a landscape. Strip away every building and every human invention, and all that remains is our naked bodies within a beautiful and harsh landscape: the backdrop of this wondrous and terrible thing we call life.
Within me is an unending stream of vast landscapes, yet unseen. They are collected from real experiences of real places, stored from memory. But memory is an abstraction of reality, for our minds condense and simplify to form a distilled version, an “idea” of what is real. These ideas congeal to form something unreal and ultimately imagined. It is from here where my Imaginary Landscapes begin: at the intersection between landscape painting, memory and inventiveness.
My Imaginary Landscapes are not created from a cohesive image which is copied from my mind to the painting surface. Rather, the process and act of painting allows the landscape to emerge, and then I respond to form meaning, building forms to convey space in the way I understand them to work. Ideas of trees and rivers and mountains, configurations of clouds, cast shadows and upheaved stones start to assemble before me, and I bring form to these things. What remains is an unreal reality within an ungrounded landscape - completely tangible, yet non-existent.
2012 MFA, RISD
2008 BFA, Colorado State University