Terrarium, 2026

A myth is a story that tells itself through accumulation, not authorship. Across generations, telling after telling folds into a single place until it becomes a verbal roadmap, a way of moving through a time and space that continues to grow truer with every voice that carries it forward.

My paintings work through a version of this same accumulation. Each landscape is built from many real places and remembered fragments, settled into something that presents itself as whole and specific. I am not inventing these places so much as compressing them, the many becoming one the way accumulated story becomes a single path through country.

What is excavated from beneath each surface is not a hidden image waiting to be found, but a record of time that can be revisited and re-engaged. The viewer completes the telling, filling the unnamed place with their own memory, their own sense of where it might be. That act of insertion is the mechanism to which the story can continue to evolve.

Somewhere, this sanctuary continues without needing to be found. A closed ecosystem, self sufficient, tending to its own growth and decay long before anyone stumbles into its clearing.

This painting imagines that arrival, the moment of coming upon a place that was never waiting to be seen. Light finds its way in through a single opening above, falling through rock and growth to water that has carved this same path for longer than any single telling could account for.

Nothing here was recorded from one place. It was gathered from many, excavated back into being the way a story surfaces only once enough tellings have carried it forward.