During the period of open imperialist expansion, the role of the landscape painter was often used to create a sense of wonderment and desire. Instead of accurate recordings, artistic liberties were often used to help implant the desire of relocation so the empires could expand into faraway lands. This premise plays out today through oppressive governments, forced globalization, continued colonialism, and exploitative tourist expansion in exotic locations such as Dubai, Belize, U.S. Virgin Islands, Indonesia and the French Polynesia. I have become interested in how my role as a landscape painter fits into the history of misconceptions, authenticity, and desire and the ways I can play inside this subversive framework. By using the guise of romantic landscape painting, I am exploring the slippery ideas of place, the way tourism and media perpetuate fantasies of the exotic, and the ways cultural identities are manipulated, misplaced, and reinvented in an age of globalization and longing for authenticity. In addition to landscape painting history, my work is concerned with how to negotiate my own desires and concerns in an age where we can travel anywhere for a price and many of the best landscapes are quickly disappearing due to the warming of the planet. By taking this role into account, my paintings have started to separate into three categories that are changing through global expansion: beaches, glaciers, and non-western cultures.
My past work started with a place and I googled all of the pictures for the parts that I wanted in the painting to create a greatest hits of the area so that place resembles the way we dream it is rather then the reality of the landscape. My work is going through a transition because the barrier of the curated collective idea of place that we get from looking at locations on the internet, magazines, or other media that helped me create my paintings in the past became endlessly frustrating for me. I wanted to go to the place, give in to my desire for the romantic Robinson Crusoe scenario where a person escapes their daily life and discovers something exotic. The paradox is that I know this is an impossibility plus the places I am most interested in carry a dark underbelly of exploitation. Embracing that I will always be an outsider and a tourist, I use this persona as a device to travel, research, and make sketches. These reference materials are later used to create paintings in the studio that explore the role we all have in these misguided fantasies of exoticism and otherness through my own memories, dreams, and misunderstandings of place and other cultures. Instead of a handful of paintings around a place or idea, I am making a whole series that I consider snippets that together start telling a story of the place. The paintings are highly influenced by the hyper-colored quality of advertising and CGI. They go in and out of flatness, the land festers with neon spray paint, dripping paint emphasizes the flatness of the image so that the paintings call attention to their own artificiality. However, I am looking for a space that can only exist inside of a painting. A Landscape where deep space can exist next to something flat and the two oppositions will fight and enhance one another at the same time. The paint dripped haphazardly onto the landscape, sanding the landscape, spray painting the landscape, all work to both destroy the desire of the idyllic place but also knit into the fabric of the painting to create texture and atmosphere for a believable space. The end result is a place that is lush, super saturated, and alluring but also slightly subversive and repulsive.
My past work started with a place and I googled all of the pictures for the parts that I wanted in the painting to create a greatest hits of the area so that place resembles the way we dream it is rather then the reality of the landscape. My work is going through a transition because the barrier of the curated collective idea of place that we get from looking at locations on the internet, magazines, or other media that helped me create my paintings in the past became endlessly frustrating for me. I wanted to go to the place, give in to my desire for the romantic Robinson Crusoe scenario where a person escapes their daily life and discovers something exotic. The paradox is that I know this is an impossibility plus the places I am most interested in carry a dark underbelly of exploitation. Embracing that I will always be an outsider and a tourist, I use this persona as a device to travel, research, and make sketches. These reference materials are later used to create paintings in the studio that explore the role we all have in these misguided fantasies of exoticism and otherness through my own memories, dreams, and misunderstandings of place and other cultures. Instead of a handful of paintings around a place or idea, I am making a whole series that I consider snippets that together start telling a story of the place. The paintings are highly influenced by the hyper-colored quality of advertising and CGI. They go in and out of flatness, the land festers with neon spray paint, dripping paint emphasizes the flatness of the image so that the paintings call attention to their own artificiality. However, I am looking for a space that can only exist inside of a painting. A Landscape where deep space can exist next to something flat and the two oppositions will fight and enhance one another at the same time. The paint dripped haphazardly onto the landscape, sanding the landscape, spray painting the landscape, all work to both destroy the desire of the idyllic place but also knit into the fabric of the painting to create texture and atmosphere for a believable space. The end result is a place that is lush, super saturated, and alluring but also slightly subversive and repulsive.
