This is a show of imagined landscapes but it is about time and change. How each of us goes through life separately. It is by intent that they are no figures in my landscapes, the landscapes are places for the viewer to imagine themselves inside.

In book “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” by John Koenig, the author has made a dictionary of made-up words that describe real but unnamed feelings and situations. One of them is the word “sonder” which he describes as

“The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own – populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness – an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep undergound, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know exist, in which you might appear only once as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blue of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”

This “sonder” is a feeling I know well. When I paint, I want the landscapes themselves to be these places where the landscape itself is living a complex and vivid life. Often landscapes are used as stages, static places upon which human narratives play out, instead I focus on how elements move and change, day by day, season by season, century by century. The colors and shapes, the land and rocks, the sky and mood all as changeable elements of one place. I want to show these landscape elements dancing, moving, almost figurative in their movement and also as unknowable.

For this show I am proposing a series of paintings ranging from 6x6” pieces all the way to 6x8 foot diptychs. Scale is important to me as it’s a way to play with place and either let the viewer get close and peer into these worlds as if they are peepholes or feel like they can step into them and enter these new worlds. New places to escape into and explore. My works range from more realistic looking landscapes to more blocky or minimalistic and colorful spaces. My process is the same for all of these, it’s all about mixing imagination and memory until I hit the purgatory between the real and the unreal. I use no references to create these imaginary worlds.

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