Divide the Day VII Print

I use the landscape as a form of escapism. Escapism is common in fiction, but less so in visual art. I want to create worlds that feel like stories I read as a child, places where everything is possible, where things that seemed static suddenly move and become alive (like rocks or trees moving around like clouds). Why landscapes? I don’t come from a traditional landscape painting background; I don’t use photographs or work from references. I am world building, creating something that doesn’t exist and playing with contradictory terms. It’s that purgatory between the real and the unreal. The land and the air. Between knowing and not knowing. It’s about discovering a line between imagination and memory and losing myself in that space. I am currently taking my paintings and turning them into installations, to create a movable changeable landscape, where the viewers can “step in” and create their own place by moving parts of the landscape around the canvas by way of magnetic shapes. My paintings of imagined spaces become magical places to wander through and explore, so that the world is a bit more beautiful and surprising. Artistic Process I work on multiple paintings of imagined landscapes in multiple series at the same time so that in my studio, I am surrounded by everyday strangeness. I anthropomorphize these human-less landscapes with their clouds and sky and lands and rocks. Parts of the landscape break away (or come together) becoming their own active subject, playing, moving and breaking away. I paint by picking one color, one shape at a time. My process feels like exploring a new place, I add pigment, scrape paint down, spray, repeat. It’s a silly and chaotic process full wrong turns and dead ends, flitting from place to pace (or piece to piece). And in the end, I want to feel like I opened a new world, full of strange mystery and magic.