Log-Tog Painting

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 use of ‘the other’ or ‘the monster’ within this ontology plays a unique role in my investigation. One reason humanity creates these ‘others’ may be to build a wall to blind ourselves from the unknown that we fear. The monstrous ‘other’ becomes an excuse, a concern of our safety, keeping us from wandering into uncharted terrain in case we die, or rather, in case we discover something that implores change. Additionally, society uses them to live vicariously through, to explore taboos, to enter the restricted areas of understanding. As we step into the ‘other’, we hypothesize, throwing our imaginations into the depths of the unknown. With reason, we step back to define our experience and expand the known. 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. One of my goals in these works is to create a vortex where paint becomes nature, nature becomes “other”, and “other” become paint again. In this cycle, branches of “the other“can possibly be found in choices as “the other” (as I explain in question 1), nature as “the other” but also in art as “the other”.