WRITINGS
Artist's Statement

My work explores the concepts of time, breakdown, reordering and renewal in an environmental context. 

It all started with Nature. That’s what it used to be called. Now it’s the Environment. 

Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, I spent much of my childhood exploring nature, first in our garden and around the block, and then on my bicycle, graduating to our car at sixteen. When we traveled, I always begged to go to natural history museums. My father, a scientist, was happy to indulge me. As a teenager, I became an avid birder (with my best friend who became a professional ornithologist). At the age of sixteen I had my first job illustrating science in a research lab.

I was always enchanted by the visual world. Art was encouraged by my parents and the art programs in our public schools. When I was thirteen I won a scholarship to a summer plein-air painting program and became hooked on landscape painting. During college, my work moved into pure abstraction but quickly thereafter moved back toward nature in a series of biomorphic abstractions based on photomicrographs of the brain. The major concerns at the time were for “pure” visual experience: no story line or overarching political, social or philosophical content. While making art it is the organization of the picture plane into a compelling visual experience that I think about. 

In graduate school, I rediscovered landscape painting and have been exploring landscape as my subject since then. I have always been drawn primarily to landscapes that are uninhabited and have a certain abstract quality inherent to them, for example, the world that is revealed at low tide, or the eroded land-forms in the American west. In recent years my work has moved mostly, but not exclusively, from depicting broad landscapes to looking at landscape details and microcosms. 

Prompted partly by my work in developing art programs for geology texts, I realized that I was being drawn to the concept of the scale of time. I painted “portraits” of large granite erratic boulders deposited by the last glaciers about 15,000 years ago, and now surrounded by second- or third-growth woods on land that was farmed 125 years ago; and thought about how those boulders, picked up hundreds of miles north and dropped there, were themselves formed deep in the earth and pushed up by tectonic forces to be plucked up by the power of miles-thick ice flowing slowly south over the landscape; how they were obstacles to the plows of farmers about four generations ago; and how they are being transformed and broken down by acids secreted by lichens growing on them, broken up by freezing and thawing cycles, and slowly disintegrated by gamma radiation; and how all that breakdown will one day flow to the sea, to be subducted by more tectonic forces and once again recreated as new rock. The relativity of time became central to my work then. 

My recent work began with a fascination with ancient trees in Japan’s temple gardens— the “disordered” twists and turns of the branches and roots superimposed on the “ordered” patterns of branching and growth of annual rings. My drawings of tree roots, bark, and forest-floor detritus then entered a transformation to the medium of relief (woodcut) prints, and those have, in turn, been transformed by painting into them, or cutting up and restructuring them. 

These transformations have thus become visual metaphors for the eons-long geological processes of erosion, deposition, sedimentation, and metamorphosis to create new material in a process that repeats itself. Some of my new work brings to mind breccia (a type of rock), sedimentary layers or faults and upheaval. Other works resemble land forms seen from far above, in the process of transformation over a time span of perhaps thousands, rather than millions, of years. Other works are transformed from my drawings of roots and bark to light seen through a forest; sky, forest and water; microscope-viewed cross sections of wood or other plant material; a tree buttress that becomes a bouquet; a restructured woodcut strip that references a watercolor Japanese hanging scroll, etc. 

Thus, it is is both the process of transformation and the multiple scales of time (human, historical, geological, for example) that has been driving my current work forward. My current works are metaphors for this process and these scales of time. And, again, it all comes back to what I called Nature when I was a kid.