I bully and beg my way through these paintings. The process is extremely improvisational within a finite set of rules. Snow is white, trees are brown and gray, rivers are blue, there are no humans or technology. My intention is not to depict something seen, but to create approximations of seen things, then combine them in ways that have overlapping meaning. I feel like this translation is a way to make things that outwardly seem familiar, but upon further inspection become very unfamiliar.

My process is dependent both on having direct experiences with nature and then recalling those experiences from a point of remove. I'm interested in a cognitive dissonance that arises from this translation. Making this work is like trying to recall a memory where the majority of the visual detail and narrative have been lost or obscured, but for some reason the memory is still there. I am trying to capture that compression of images and sensations retained by the mind. The meaning of the work relies not on one single condition or reading, but on our ability to effortlessly process a confluence of meanings generated by the same piece.

These pictures seem to fail as landscapes, while succeeding as abstractions, yet inextricably remain landscapes. Or maybe they walk a line that removes them from both categories. The physicality of the surface and the cartoon-like simplification of the imagery undermines seeing the work as only a landscape painting. Brushstrokes and textures mimic the feeling of nature more than they literally describe it. It is like there are two separate systems of logic at work in these paintings. One defines it in terms of familiar symbols for nature and the landscape and another abstract logic seems connected to an intuitive sensibility.