My practice is rooted in an embodied experience of the landscape—an act of traversing space, absorbing sensory impressions, and translating those encounters into painted form. Exploring the vast, glacially carved terrains of the Eastern Sierra and the Dolomites, I experience the land through movement, where perception is constantly shifting between the immediacy of what is beneath my feet and the expansive horizon beyond. This dynamic engagement informs my paintings, which do not function as static representations but rather as explorations of how place is perceived, remembered, and reconstructed through time.
Unlike the Hudson River School painters, who sought to distill the sublime into grand, panoramic vistas, my work resists a singular, totalizing view of the landscape. Instead, I embrace fragmentation, layering, and shifting perspectives—reflecting how the experience of moving through the land unfolds in non-linear ways. In contrast to today’s inundation of landscape imagery through social media, where endless scrolling compresses place into rapid, consumable fragments, my work prioritizes slowness, materiality, and the accumulation of time. Just as geologic forces shape the earth through stratification, erosion, and upheaval, my paintings emerge through an intuitive process of layering, reworking, and responding to the surface.
Integral to this process is my nonconformist approach to mark-making, which resists adherence to a singular style or methodology. My paintings evolve through a dynamic interplay of gesture, precision, and erasure—where structured forms dissolve into atmospheric washes, bold impasto collides with delicate veils of color, and the act of painting itself mirrors the unpredictability and fluidity of the landscape. This varied application of paint allows for multiple readings of space, where abstraction and realism coexist, much like the perceptual shifts experienced while hiking—where details emerge and recede, where movement alters perspective.
Each painting operates as both an independent exploration of place and part of a larger, interwoven experience. Like the act of navigating a landscape, the work invites the viewer to move through it—engaging with layers of paint as one might traverse terrain, shifting between surface and depth, proximity and distance. Through this interplay of movement, materiality, and perception, my work seeks to reframe landscape not as a fixed image, but as a lived, evolving encounter—where the land is not just seen, but felt.
My practice is grounded in the act of traversing and perceiving the landscape—engaging with the natural world through movement, observation, and memory. Hiking through mountainous regions such as the Eastern Sierra and the Dolomites, I experience the terrain not as a singular, fixed vista but as a shifting interplay of proximity and vastness, intimacy and expanse. This perceptual fluidity—where attention oscillates between the lichen-covered rock beneath my feet and the distant ridgelines dissolving into atmosphere—becomes the foundation for my paintings. Each work exists as both an autonomous translation of place and an interwoven fragment of a larger, durational experience.
The Hudson River School painters sought to evoke the sublime through panoramic, meticulously rendered landscapes, positioning the viewer as an observer of nature’s grandeur. In contrast, my work resists the singular, objective gaze, instead embracing the subjective and fragmented nature of perception. The contemporary oversaturation of landscape imagery through social media has further distanced us from direct experience, reducing the place to a fleeting, consumable aesthetic. The speed of scrolling—where hundreds of landscapes can be absorbed in moments—flattens both time and depth, eroding the sensory immersion that being in the land requires. Against this, my work aligns itself with the slowness of geologic time, where accumulation and erosion unfold over millennia, mirroring the layered process of painting itself.
Each painting is not a direct depiction but an experiential mapping—a synthesis of memory, movement, and collected visual traces. Photography, often used as a means to document, becomes a conceptual tension in my practice, highlighting the gap between captured image and lived experience. While reference images provide structure, they are ultimately fragmented and reassembled in the studio, allowing abstraction and materiality to convey the act of navigating the landscape rather than merely representing it.
Through a convergence of realism and abstraction, my paintings function as both discrete reflections of a place and integral components of a broader, interconnected experience. Like the act of hiking—where each step offers a new, temporary perspective within a larger journey—each painting stands on its own while also contributing to an ongoing exploration of land, time, and perception. The viewer is invited not just to see these landscapes but to move through them, engaging with their layered surfaces as one might navigate the terrain itself—through shifting focus, slow discovery, and embodied presence.