I enter experience close up, order
navigate by detail. I find landscapes and backgrounds most comfortable to paint, treatment as seven blades of grass or a grid of seeds. My visual syntax is formed by mixing imagery from a variety of sources, for sale toggled pieces that hint at a wider story.

The Family History series are a series of hybrid images combining 11th Century botanical drawings and personal family photos. Both sources represent mystery and edges of changing perceptions. The botanical drawings emerged in a time when nascent scientific understanding existed alongside mystical awareness of the natural world, while the family photographs included people I never knew. Combining the two allows me to project an emotional narrative that fills gaps in my personal history creating a new story of its own.

The nexus of the Fly and Fallen series was a visit to the PRBO center, a Marin County research facility dedicated to conservation and study of birds. Along with bird census and other ecological studies, the center has a collection of bird skins. These are not taxidermy in which the objective is to mimic life gesture rather these skins are lovingly prepared bodies of the deceased. The birds are stuffed with soft cotton, eyes missing, their feet tied together, and a tag. The tag is an obituary of sorts, with their name in Latin and English, the date of its death, and the location where the bird was found. Fly and Fallen is a visual analogy of a larger journey of risk and the inevitable end of flight.

Both the Landscapes and Botanical series approach landscapes from a non traditional scale and synthesize a wider perspective. The small abstract watercolors in the Landscape series reference a larger environment through lenses of pigment and water, while the Botanical drawings look at the whole through its parts.