Barcorpsom Painting

This piece was prompted by a dream I had one night. I woke up to feel I was a different person, as if I had some extra ability to bring healing. What happened in the dream is something I remember, but what came out onto the canvas is a world that grows new branches of narrative with every viewer that sees it. Slipping in and out of the familiar through abstract mark making, my work draws parallels between nature and human nature. Paint application ranges from thin willowy-fang-like strokes to thick juicy plumages of clustered marks. These shapes coalesce into landscape, figure, and home, eventually dissipating into abstract impressions. My hope is that viewers will encounter their inner realities by engaging the work's limbo state. Within this innate reflection, I question the potential fears and inspirations, the knowns and unknowns the observers might meet in themselves. This interaction mirrors the sublime that landscape painting aspires to. My goal is to uncover the possible hidden landscapes of being human: who we are, our bodies as organic technology, and humans as spirit beings. The Others, also found in my paintings, become a metaphor for the state of alterity within humanity, acting as guardians to the unknown. One reason for the myths of others, whether extra terrestrials, Icelandic trolls, or plant monsters (perhaps an interpretation of these sculptures), may be to process the (potentially safe) unknown that we may fear. The other can become an excuse, a concern of our safety, keeping us from wandering into uncharted terrain. Additionally, society often uses others as a way to live vicariously. They become an avatar to prompt the imagination into the unexplored, initiating areas of hidden understanding. As we engage the others we discover more of our being. Thinking on these ideas, I take the limbo state of my landscapes to construct figural forms of ‘others’. I play with one thing becoming another, marks becoming landscape, and then landscape becoming ‘the other’. The brush stroke becomes a vortex for multiple forms or ideas. The plasticity offers the viewer a choice or perhaps a door to the unknown, and in that choice I hope a piece of the viewer’s inner-landscape manifests.