Still Life/Landscape Painting
The first group is the landscape/still life series. The landscape images are sometimes borrowed directly from 19th Century paintings by artists such as Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, and incorporated into a small domestic space. The starting point was the thought that while we still place great value on the original paintings, they represent a view of the world that is anachronistic. For the Hudson River School generation the wilderness was certainly a place to visit, but the work of human civilization was always under threat from chaotic natural forces that would undo all of the hard work of building a habitable environment. Our conception of largely undisturbed tracts of land is that they represent a fragile order that is under threat from excessive human encroachment. We have become the chaotic force, and those endless landscapes appear very finite to us.