Influences On New Works

I am drawn to the optimism of Susan O’Malley’s It Will Be More Beautiful Than You Imagined series, and aspire to bring a similar sense of possibility to my own work. Still, I find myself repeatedly complicating that optimism with pessimism and irony, drawn to the contradictions that surface when our experience of the world meets the histories it conceals. My oil painting What We Breathe, for example, began as a celebration of hiking through Northern California’s open spaces. As the work evolved, however, I became increasingly conscious of what lay beneath the landscape: some of these seemingly idyllic places had once been sites of military installations. The painting shifted from an expression of pleasure in the natural world to a meditation on the uneasy coexistence of beauty and violence, and on the histories that can remain invisible within places we cherish.