Artist Statement

Fantastical landscapes are portals into imaginative drifts and deeper introspections.  Through them, our interior thoughts and exterior realities can become so intertwined that they reveal new insights.  The landscapes act as distorting mirrors, metaphors for the expansion of our perceived reality.  Ordinary experience is transformed to a more symbolic or visionary level.

Fantasy is often only associated with childhood.  For a child, a fairytale is a vision of an entertaining, magical world in which characters perform heroic deeds.  When I was young, I envisioned the fantastic worlds revealed in the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and used those worlds to inform my own realities.  I invented my own fantastical logic to interpret my surroundings.  As I grew older and gained a deeper understanding of my social and biological world, I interpreted my surroundings differently.  The fairytales and myths that I read when I was younger were no longer simply only entertainment, but also moral lessons, spiritual dialogues, or commentary on the conundrums of life.  The childhood process of imaginative transportation into another realm lingers into adulthood; it's simply that the vehicles have changed.

My recent paintings are explorations of fantastic landscapes infused with modernist design.  Both elements are intertwined, co-dependendent, and contiguous.  Unexpected scenarios occur within the work.  Bauhaus design elements can sprout from shrubs, de Stijl explosions occur alongside gothic castles, and color wheels shoot from floating islands.  Metaphorically, this is how my everyday perceptions operate.  My cognitive memories of modern design are tangled with fantasy worlds.  Within these landscapes I weave fantasy with my twenty-first century reality.  I create these worlds not as escapism but to probe deeper meanings of the realities that surround me.  This elevated reality takes human consciousness into accord.