My art celebrates our fellow travelers on this planetary ark, in a style that asks participation from you, my viewer.
I'm a Montana-based artist with an abiding love of the modern American west -- its wildlife, horses, cowboys, and cowgirls. My mission is to share my wonder at the beauty and sentience of the animal nations with which we share this planet, and to connect you to Nature with my work.
The inspiration
My painting process has evolved into a ‘disrupted realism’ style, where my subjects are fragmented, and the final outcome of each piece is unknown at the start; the journey involves abstraction, drawing, scraping, and re-working — all in a search for “the right amount of not enough”.
The fragmented, ‘incomplete’ aspect of these paintings is my response to the chaos and change that is everywhere in our environment - social, political, natural. Many of the paintings are intended to confront the viewer, to spur us to ask questions of ourselves and of each other. The “Vanishing Ark” series is one example; these pieces are a response to the UN report in summer 2019 that a million or more species are likely to go extinct soon.
The ‘incompleteness’ of my subjects also feels to me as if it is revealing something more elemental, more essential...perhaps reflecting my own deep emotion and love for the animals I paint. These pieces require a deep, wordless conversation; they demand more from me than any other body of work I’ve done before, and I frequently struggle with self-doubt in the process…yet each painting that works is deeply satisfying.
