Landscape paintings painted on location.

 

 An ongoing project begun during the pandemic.  Oil and acrylic on canvas.

My recent paintings have been inspired by the unknown and the unknowable.
Themes  include nature as a guide and source of personal healing. Some of my paintings take
inspiration from both rituals and votives as manifestations of desire and prayer.

These are two paintings in a series completed in 2020.
 
The forest edge is a margin between two worlds. It is a transition zone between light and shade, the highly cultivated and the wild. It can serve as an entrance, but can also be dense and hard to penetrate.

The five paintings in the series Kindling/Tinder evolved from looking at the bones of plants in late fall through early spring.  Bare branches and dry brush hold the promise of new growth and seed. In an unfamiliar landscape they are place holders for what is about to come.  The bare twigs, grass, and goldenrod I depict in my series are materials that might be used to start a fire. 

Ideas of realization, birth, rebirth, and struggle inform the works in this series.

Throughout most of these works, hands search, climb, embrace, push forward, and fall back, both together and separately. They interweave across the picture plane through a space that is hinted at or imagined.

Some of the works use paper as an observed setting. Collected ephemera and detritus such as Bingo cards act as the raw materials of assemblages, which I observe and interpret through oil paint and brush.

For me painting is a way to find a personal center in a place where present, past, and future co-mingle. Painting acts  as a mechanism, to process and meditate on systems and to respond to immediate and far-flung surroundings.  In  "Paper Paintings", newspapers, images from art history books, Xeroxes, digital printouts, receipts, post-it notes, envelopes, printer paper, and memos are the raw materials of his assemblages, which I observe and interpret through oil paint and brush. In these works, compositions of ephemera and everyday detritus jumble and layer about the picture plane, alternately revealing and obscuring.

Over the years I have lugged my camera into state parks in the Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia mountains. For a long time my eyes have searched this green space for early interlopers from abroad coming into contact with a new world. Unfortunately, my mind sees something different than my eyes, and my eyes see something different than the camera. This new work in my series “Lost Horseshoes” is in part an attempt to fill this gap.
This seven paintings in the series Lost Horseshoes, uses a romanticized piece of colonial folklore and history known as “The Knights of The Golden Horseshoe" as a point of departure. In this story the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, and around fourteen of his wealthy friends (whom he later is said to have given golden horseshoe stick pins) made a 5 day journey across the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1716. These “early explorers” are said to have drunk many toasts to their king as they claimed new land for him on their journey. Less celebrated are the large number of enslaved individuals that would have supported every step of this gentlemen's expedition or the fact that the land they were "exploring" and simultaneously claiming for the king and gentry was already occupied by American Indians.

These Two Highways / What I May Have Seen on Highways 70 and 340

The paintings making up this series are meditations on highway 70 and 340, specifically the section of these two highways running west from Baltimore, through West Virginia, into northwest Virginia. The paintings feature personal interpretations I have made of the landscape based on traveling along these highways, juxtaposed with reinterpretations of figure drawings by 19th century Harper's illustrator, writer, and journalist, David Hunter Strother, better known by his pen name Porte Crayon. Extracted out of their original and sometimes problematic contexts more than 150 years later, many of the figures represented in these works are within an hour's drive of where they were originally drawn. The time in which Strother worked was a time of significant upheaval in America. The 10 years before the Civil War were the peak of Strother's career as an artist. He later was a Union Officer in the Shenandoah Valley and, given his muddy political views and his alliance to the Union over his state of Virginia, was on both sides of the conflict. His work for Harper's and archived, sketchbooks, many of which are dated with location, document hundreds of people throughout the region of all classes and races at a time before convenient and widespread photography. Though his body of work is a detailed attempt to document the people of the area it is also a product of it's time and place. This show is meant to share a conversation I’ve had with myself over a number of years about the complex history these highways pass through and the ongoing development of Western Maryland, Northwest Virginia and West Virginia around 70 and 340, as Washington DC continues to stretch its circle further outwards the farmland and landscape of the past is becoming housing developments. I sought to interpret figures that I felt offer a glimpse of humanity, at once trying to see if I could envision these documented people in the landscape that once existed, simultaneously wondering how they might react to see this same landscape today.

This series was exhbited at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, VA and 
 Minas Gallery in Baltimore Md.