Focusing on the consequences of climate change through a new approach to painting.
My acrylic paintings depict the ravaged landscape of “ghost forests.” These once-verdant topographies are the remnants of wooded areas that are being destroyed by groundwater salination, pesticides, herbicides, drought, pests, and storms – in short, places where something has gone horribly wrong.
This destruction is conveyed by bare trees set in disarrayed, malformed landscapes that are apt to include multiple vistas, horizon lines, and perspectives. Such disorientation, in settings that are always and entirely depopulated, detaches the viewer from traditional notions of landscape and the world as we know it.
As beautiful as they are disturbing, these denuded and tortured forms, often in luminous settings, reflect the tragic irony of ghost forests: the forces that enable modern living are also poisoning the literal and figurative well.