Statement

Artist Statement

By using personal experiences of landscapes, this body of work is creating abstracted memories and/or thoughts of landscapes into paintings. By using fluid materials and the process in which they are created through pouring, has the same affect as the fluidness of bodies of water on land or an a shoreline. For example, a puddle may sit for days and eventually evaporate, leaving some sediment behind. By viewing this body of work in this manner, one starts to think about how the sediments were left behind, either by accident or for an intentional purpose. In this case, they were left for the sole purpose to engage a personal connection or experience with the viewer to imagine a landscape where they may have seen the same color or combinations of colors layering.

We engage landscapes everyday and some impact others differently. Growing up on Lake Erie was what drove me to make landscape paintings, abstract or not. The colors reflected off the water and the brightness and vibrancy of those colors are something that is constantly reminisced in my work. I am constantly engaged with the landscapes around me, whether if it is a sound, color, or images such as a sunset over a body of water or a distant line of trees on the edge of a field.

While I am working from memories and engaging myself in those thoughts in how I felt or how a color impacted me, I am also concerned in how the viewer will engage them. I hope that they can pick up a horizon or color placement as a sunset or sunrise, maybe even a field with clouds above. I hope that what they see may trigger their own memories to bring up a feeling they may have felt from outside their own busy lives. There is always room for the viewer to see other things into the paintings. I feel that they can bring something else to them that I may not be able to do myself, kind of like the magic of seeing some image in a cloud.

Though one may be able to find other images within my work, I do give them certain titles to reel them back into my realm of thinking about landscapes. Each painting is given a title that I imaged what they are. These are given to just be a kick-starter to engage thoughts in the viewer’s mind of a landscape they could associate with the colors and title and bring their own stories or memories to each painting.