I have spent twenty years painting the landscape as a reflection of cultural values, finding stories in the messes we’ve made and uncanny glimmers in the spaces we shape and traverse.

I often work on large complex narrative paintings that are sparked from absurd, joyous and painful stories that may be personal, School Pick-up, 2022, or encountered in the news cycle, Evergreen, 2023, in reference to the monumental container ship that became wedged in the Suez Canal for six days in 2021. The paintings are often situated in the landscape, but sometimes make their way into the interior.

When working from life, I make drawings and take photographs on site in the performative plein air tradition, “Shh… look she’s painting….” In these small paintings, I work-out color explorations and find moments of solace and clarity- a brief break from teaching and zooming and parenting and worrying and cleaning and protesting. I live and work in New York’s Hudson Valley, an area notable for its historic Hudson River school paintings, jammed with squeaky-clean realism, macho colonialism and epically lush views.

My new paintings are a hyperaccumulation of colors, marks, stories, places, joy and struggle. They are situated in the landscape as well as domestic interiors. The elements of painting, color, scale, space, composition are ripe for play and manipulation to vividly convey meaning. Color and humor cut across the grain of pain. At times, in these paintings and uncertain times and topographies, the ground is terra ferma, while the orientation of figures and objects are inverted as a reflection of human inflicted unpredictability. In other recent paintings, the scale of the figures, reflects the emotional largess of parenting and even teaching, as adults are represented in diminished size relative to their younger counterparts.

A lot of things are out of scale right now. Power is slipping from the hands of the capable into aberrant unchartered territory. Parenting feels like that in every direction, the love and the struggles and the holding close and letting go are all expansive and constrictive. Scale is one of the fundamental principles of painting. It is used to create a sense of depth in illusionistic painting as well as create a visual hierarchy, large/small. This can be used in formal or narrative terms (big or small swaths of color, big or small characters). No special effects here.