Landscape has always been an important theme in my work, at times oblique, but more recently front and center.

While working with the imagery of U.S. currency (memorial portraits, Beaux-Arts bric-à-brac, and “spider webbing”), I flipped over a five and realized that most of our bills have landscapes on the back. What an easy entry into a conceptually and historically rich genre: place as identity, landscape as ideology, theology, and a manifestation of the sublime from Burke and Kant to Newman and Lyotard. Who knew?

I’m currently trying to wrestle the raw materials of my Sierra sketchbooks into finished paintings.