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I am interested in the landscape of today as it relates to the Great American Landscape paintings of our nations past. Like these paintings, I try to imbue my work with symbolic meaning. Early American landscape paintings helped to define a national identity and ideology for a young America. I am not striving to explicitly define our contemporary national identity, but am attempting to use my work as a springboard for exploring personal identity with respect to the American landscape of today.
The painting process I explore corresponds to issues of growth and progress in American urban landscapes. I seek out the mundane, the average, and the overlooked places of urban life and attempt to show their beauty and complexities by reconstructing them on canvas. I allow my additive and subtractive methods in the studio, the building up paint as well as the scraping and sanding of those surfaces, to work as a metaphor for the constant demolishing and rebuilding that can be seen in every part of our contemporary landscape. I use the objects and subject matter found in the environment so that I might document the landscape of our time while simultaneously locating myself inside that framework.
