Artist Statement
My work is about the transcendence of the landscape. As a child, I spent much of my time running around the mountains collecting rocks. These days, I work as a snowboard instructor, and spend much of the winter riding the powder through glades and sending myself off features alongside my snow community. Nature has always inspired wonder within me and offered me a way to expand my perspective. In my paintings, I aim to convey the transcendence that I feel while experiencing the breathtaking vista of the Alpine into the mesas, a glistening crystal in the ground, or looking up at stars.
In a time when traditional religion is on the decline, I am seeking to engage with existential inquiry through my creative practice. I create paintings that map out a personal cosmology, also known as, that which gives me a meaningful compass. This cosmology, which is intricately tide my experiences within landscape around me, points to the sense of awe and connection I feel within these localities and with my friends. For example, the mountains act as mythical portals to a personal heaven, and rivers and lakes can be a passageway into the shadows of the subconscious. For nature is both a salve and amorally ominous. Our experience within it projects that which is within us.
In terms of my process, painting provides an opportunity to exercise an alternative way of knowing that is like prayer. Each painting emerges through an intuitive process of listening and responding. The work is not planned but built as the vision becomes more clear. Painting is magic-- magic not as an illusion but as an amplification of the small voice within. I am seeking an engagement with that which is emergent within me and apparently, there are mountains all the way down.
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