On the Back of a Wrinkle Painting

The Forest series rests in a limbo state between romantic landscape and abstract expressionist painting. The brushstrokes coalesce as the forms of nature are beginning to take shape, but before any structure takes root the forms dissipate and fall back into abstract mark making. The painting then becomes a node of possibilities. The viewer then has a chance to engage their imaginative space with the work to discover the various possibilities, whether different appearances of nature (like the sublime landscape paintings), feelings refracted from shapes and colors (like the abstract marks of Kandinsky), combinations of nature and emotion (like the overwhelming spaces in Turner's work), and the many other possibilities beyond language that uncover the inner landscapes of the viewer. The compositions of The Forest series create a nesting space. The paintings cradle the viewer into an enclosed space that is partly built by the paint, but also partly built by the imagination of the viewer themselves. The tunnels lead the viewer into a space the mind is constantly putting together. The viewers imagined self within the space becomes the tool that creates the nest, like a bird constantly turning to place each twig around itself to create a customized nest according to its own body, the viewer's mind is constantly turning to define the space. This type of nest space harkens back to home, yet the paintings contain another space. Light beyond the borders of the forest remains unknown, the space beyond the home, the space of alterity. This resonates back to the natural forms falling apart back into abstract mark making. It takes the viewer back into the uncanny regions of the work, where imagination and infinite possibilities are captured and cycled through in a continuum of creating, revealing, and nesting. My hope is that through these various processes at play the viewer will encounter their inner landscapes of embodied space-time, memory, projected futures, imagination, and thought space.