I spent my childhood on a vast Colorado plateau looking west to the Rocky Mountains and have travelled widely, immersing myself in landscape, absorbing the experience and feeling of place. The ephemeral quality of light in nature evokes the Celtic notion of a “thin place”, a place of energy where the veil between this world and the eternal is thin. There is a seesaw between the visible and non-visible in my paintings. I see them as emotional geographies and psychic landscapes. Nature corresponding to human emotional states was inherent in 19th-century Northern European Romanticism, as well as in the work of the Tonalists who reduced the landscape to an essence of intimate and resonant non-narrative abstractions.

I am interested in flows of quiet, liquid pigment and the ways in which these skeins of chance-derived marks reflect the bigger cosmos. An experience of nature’s power and depth is reflected in the materials, an alchemy through which the pooling of pigment creates a microcosm that relates to the larger macrocosm of the planet: weather patterns, landmasses and shorelines, cloud banks and the relationship of these in proximity to each other. The images work like a mnemonic map, we are a part of and not separate from the land we live on.