My work is “realist abstraction”, which illustrates the mythic imagination and archives conflict, expanse, engulfment and infinity. Primarily a painter, I also use video, sculpture and digital tools to trace and record actual and symbolic geography, time and the timeless. Influences important to my work include landscape traditions, comic books, and scientific imaging.

Through artmaking I combine these disparate elements into paintings which locate my own take on narrative, mythmaking, place and perception. Comic books were for me, as for many, my introduction to the potential of drawing to transport us to new worlds- inner worlds which tap on larger mythic archetypes. I learned to draw copying panels from comic books and recollect feeling an understanding of the pictures before I could read the story. Once I could understand the text and story, I remained most attracted to the dynamic forms and explosive energy within the adventure.

The adventure I found in comic books was echoed in early trips abroad. Visiting my mother’s home country of Bolivia proved to have a profound impact. At a young age, encountering Illimani of the Andes Mountains and Pre Columbian ruins of Tiahuanaco gave me the sensation of expansive immensity and distant time. Ancient artifacts and geology hinted at the sublime.

 Finally, I am interested in the ways in which tools and technology allow us to capture forces within our environment and bodies. For me, scientific imaging has aspects of sublime- quite literally a shot in the dark, these tools attempt to capture in time a force that we cannot readily see but are profoundly shaped by- a heat map, a bathymetry scan. Many types of imaging, such as sonar or computational fluid dynamics, resemble proto digital forms and use color-coded structures to model a force or movement set against a blank background. Here technology presents us with a visual translation of something unknowable. Each model has its own simplified language, abstract yet containing information.

 My work is a synthesis of these sources. For example, most recent paintings are abstractions that allude simultaneously to comic book explosion panels, baroque drapery, and digitally imaged turbulence/ weather models. Undulating surfaces crack, fracture and dissolve, as entropic, metaphysical landscapes. The paintings map the tumult of our time and our fractured relationship to the natural world.