"Greenhouse Pandemic three" Painting

My paintings explore a world where nature, popular culture, mythology, human identity, and collective memory exist in the same space. I use the greenhouse as both a physical environment and a metaphor: a place where life is cultivated, contained, protected, and transformed.

Across the Greenhouse series, carefully constructed human environments collide with the unpredictability of the natural world. Flowers, vegetables, animals, automobiles, speakers, historical figures, fictional characters, and anonymous people coexist without a fixed hierarchy. The paintings deliberately resist a single narrative, instead functioning as visual ecosystems in which every figure becomes part of a larger, constantly shifting story.

I am interested in the tension between the cultivated and the wild. The greenhouse suggests order and control, yet my compositions are deliberately crowded and excessive. Plants grow around people and machines; animals become companions, masks, symbols, or alter egos; recognizable cultural imagery is placed beside invented characters and personal observations. This collision creates an environment that feels simultaneously familiar and impossible.

The recurring movement between land and water is also important. The greenhouse represents a constructed world—humanity's attempt to organize and preserve nature—while the ocean suggests a deeper, less controllable realm. By bringing these environments together, I explore the boundary between what we create and what exists independently of us.

My figures often appear as performers within this strange ecosystem. Some look directly at the viewer, while others seem absorbed in their own private worlds. Their differences in appearance, character, costume, and cultural reference are intentional. Together they form a kind of contemporary mythology, where no single identity dominates. Humans and animals share the same visual importance, suggesting a world in which the distinction between civilization, nature, fantasy, and instinct becomes increasingly unstable.

The paintings are also shaped by a fascination with art history, cinema, mythology, fashion, advertising, and everyday visual culture. I treat these references not as fixed symbols but as fragments that can be rearranged and given new relationships. A classical figure can stand beside a cartoon-like animal, a vintage automobile, or a contemporary character without explanation.