Soil As Witness
In this new body of work, I return to large-scale oil painting after five years of working solely with water-based media. I conceive of the landscape as a body, just as I do the figures that it spontaneously generates. Relying on color, rather than line I create a community of psychopomps- intermediary figures who transport dying souls from this world to the next. Soothers of discomfort, these exhausted bodies represent intergenerational trauma and how it is manifested in the flesh. I rub the paint into the surface of the canvas to create stains that compel new figuration or signal forgotten histories and the implied absence of who or what might have been. The paint bleeds and washes over these bodily forms and personalities who are without clear boundary; they are made up of all that surrounds, skin porous and memory infinite. A fear of contagion floats somewhere between the figures, perhaps subtly beneath fields of color, and is responsible somehow for their terrible mistakes and bad behavior. I use color to speak about this fear and allow gesture to be the narrative.
In this new body of work, I return to large-scale oil painting after five years of working solely with water-based media. I conceive of the landscape as a body, just as I do the figures that it spontaneously generates. Relying on color, rather than line I create a community of psychopomps- intermediary figures who transport dying souls from this world to the next. Soothers of discomfort, these exhausted bodies represent intergenerational trauma and how it is manifested in the flesh. I rub the paint into the surface of the canvas to create stains that compel new figuration or signal forgotten histories and the implied absence of who or what might have been. The paint bleeds and washes over these bodily forms and personalities who are without clear boundary; they are made up of all that surrounds, skin porous and memory infinite. A fear of contagion floats somewhere between the figures, perhaps subtly beneath fields of color, and is responsible somehow for their terrible mistakes and bad behavior. I use color to speak about this fear and allow gesture to be the narrative.
