This body of work represents my ongoing efforts to understand and respond to the landscape. The objects are hybrids: simultaneously paintings and sculptures, they arise out of traditional and contemporary interests, and they are as attentive to conceptual concerns as expressive sensibilities. These four pieces are substantial physical forms, with a skin that echoes both the painterly process as well as its geological inspiration.
The forms are created out of a contemporary civil engineering material, and are based on observed local landforms as well as Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data transformed into wire meshes with 3D computer programs. Color, too, derives objectively from observation—skills honed through years of study and painting practice, including plein aire painting activity, as I carefully recorded the palette of colors I witnessed in the landscape I see every day—each set from a specific moment in time.
Out of this analytical substructure comes a poetic form. In the end, however, the laws of nature will take the most credit for whatever beauty these pieces hold. Liquid paint runs, drips, and spreads as governed by gravity and surface tension, creating rivulets and blends that no brush could ever duplicate.
Using Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data and 3D digital design software, the mesh works study the geometric structure beneath the surface of a particular section of the landscape. While the triangulated grid clearly connotes a high-tech computer process, those lines appear incised in a thick, impasto paint layer, clearly handmade and expressive.