The landscape of the freeway is usually only a passing one; it is a space between destinations, designed to pass near, but not through, the places it connects. Even for travelers who choose to stop at designated rest areas, the details of these surroundings still slip by at the edge of their awareness.

These areas are deliberately simplified environments designed to be durable and low maintenance. They are standardized and utilitarian. But for a brief moment, travelers here are brought into contact with the landscape and with one another, outside of the private spaces of their automobiles or of commercial space.

Although these places have no continuity of history, no layers of shared identity, the paintings that represent them attempt, through painstaking observation and the use of an anachronous technique, to transcend the mundane experience of the built environment and evoke a trace of the sublime.