Bend In the River

For many years as an architect, I engaged with the built environment’s impact on human and ecological health. As a painter, I investigate how human activities impact landscapes, changing them from their natural and balanced conditions. My work centers around aerial imagery of industrial accidents, extreme weather, and scarred landscapes. What unifies these themes is their sense of movement—intense and yet fleeting.

Working in an abstract expressive form to transmit movement and directionality, I use brushwork and poured or pooled fluid paint to provide an aerial view, flattened yet layered. I work primarily in acrylic, but use elements such as charcoal, graphite, collage and metal leaf in many paintings.

For the viewer, I want the experience of my paintings to engage a temporal process of being drawn in to the surface of the canvas by color and compositional movement, gradually coming to understand the implications of the subject matter. I want the viewer to feel a physical pull into the canvas, as enveloped by the headiness of color and movement as I am during the painting process.

The four pieces I’ve submitted present concepts of climate change and the transient, fleeting movement each captures. As they call to mind the potential for adaptation and mitigation of extreme weather effects, the paintings embody a sense of physicality and motion that I’ve tried to capture in the era of our changing climate.