I collect images from museums, books, and digital sources. During each chapter of my life, particular images rise unbidden to the surface, shaped by my current preoccupations. This restless, scrolling approach connects me to diverse languages of art, craft, history, and the vernacular of color.
A renewed interest in landscape painting began during a year of full-time travel in 2022, as I worked through my conflicted relationship with astonishing new environments. These paintings grapple with contradictions of beauty, the limitations of perspective, and growing concerns about climate change. Drawing inspiration from Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, my work examines how cultural and historical weight shapes our understanding of the natural world, recognizing landscape itself as a framework of human intervention and imagination.
My practice has now evolved to include collaboration with AI language models, whose vast repository of ingested images offers imperfect shortcuts to illusion. The process begins with lush, gestural oil paintings informed by historical references, direct observation, and elaborate verbal AI prompts. I then photograph these works and feed them back into the AI system, whose responses become source material for smaller, swifter paintings in water-based media on tinted plaster. Through these recursive cycles, my imagery evolves in unexpected directions.
This AI collaboration echoes themes in Meghan O'Gieblyn's God, Human, Animal, Machine, particularly how artificial systems mirror human cognition and creativity. By engaging in this feedback loop, I question the boundaries between creator and tool, natural and synthetic, while exploring how these dynamics shape our understanding of the sublime. Complementing these paintings, I create ink drawings on synthetic paper—grayscale works that advance my dialogue with art history, AI systems, and the unpredictable behavior of liquid pigment on surface.
The resulting works present landscapes viewed from an uncanny remove. While approaching abstraction, they retain suggestive elements—rocks, plants, wildlife, water. The paintings' physical constraints and materiality intentionally challenge conventions of depth and gravity. This approach draws from a lineage of painters—from Brueghel to Courbet to the Hudson River School—who explored their perspectives within shifting surroundings. By integrating traditional techniques, AI collaboration, and philosophical inquiry, I examine how we understand landscape as a construct of memory, technology, and material presence. My work pursues a fundamental tension: the material veracity of colored mark on surface and the seductive illusion of space—where a brushstroke can exist both as itself and as a bird in flight.