Sunrise in Monument Valley 2009 48" x 60" oil on canvas. This painting comes from my trip out West last summer, during which I drove out the Monument Valley for sunrise. This scene is from my return to Kayenta after the sun had risen on the red rock valley.

Jenny Lake Storm Clouds 2008 48" x 60" oil on canvas. This is a scene from my hike around Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park this past summer.

Vondelpark 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. The trees in Amsterdam's central park are beautifully knotted and twisted, much like the city's personality.

Saturday in the Park 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. This spot in Regent's Park is particularly special to me, as I passed by it on my way home every day in London last summer.

Firenze in Fuego 2009 48" x 48" oil on canvas. This is a view of Florence from the Boboli Gardens. I worked from both photographs and memory to recollect the experience.

My painting is closely intertwined with travel. I am interested in the idea of capturing a time, a place, an essential experience of travel and manipulating it until the painting becomes a new experience in itself. My motives for travel reveal the motives for my painting, as well. I travel to escape the mundane, to plunge myself into the new, the unfamiliar, the challenging. I travel to take home something new; to reawaken the spontaneity that my tightly wound schedule suffocates. I travel, and I paint, to push myself past the ordinary, to learn about myself so that I may shape myself.
I am interested in self-expression through landscape painting, in which emotion amplifies the forms and colors of the landscape until they become an exaggeration of nature’s reality. Color’s ability to intoxicate, to stimulate a loss of control, a loss of focus, and a loss of self fascinates me. It is the state of not-self the hyperbolic landscape induces in which I am interested.
Travel also induces a state of not-self, as it is both an escape from reality and enables an amplification of identity –because it lifts the boundaries of reality. The freedom of creating myself anew in a new place is seductive to me—the ability to remold my character, my appearance, and my self to fit my desires and my needs in the present moment. I paint landscapes of my travel experiences because both travel and painting offer me a state of complete self absorption—a state of not-self that is exhilarating and freeing for me. Painting gives me this intoxicating freedom that I crave.