I was born and raised in Colorado and have lived in Brooklyn for over 15 years. I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University and later went on to complete a Master of Fine Art in painting at the New York Academy of Art.
My work is always in some way autobiographical. My landscapes explore my relationship to place and time. Some of the places I’ve recorded are ingrained in me, places I’ve gone to since I was a child. And when I go back to them as an adult, I feel I can pick up with them where we left off, like old friends—a red rock formation at a certain snowy fork in the road, an old mossy tree that grew years before my time. So, if I return to a place and it has drastically changed, I feel alarmed, violated. Maybe this is why I record places that I sense may not be there when I return—my grandmother’s house at dusk, a closed cement plant I always drove past. Most recently the forest I played in as a child that every year is more and more changed by the effects of climate change and beetle kill.
A few summers ago, that forest burnt to the ground. The summer after, an extremely wet summer of flooding rivers, I went back to my woods. Standing in the forest that remains is like standing in an otherworldly landscape, a tree graveyard. Green on the edges from that extreme wet after extreme drought, all that regrowth set against black char and red beetle limbs was overwhelming to look at but ultimately cathartic to paint. I painted the forest en plein air and then took what I learned from looking back to the studio and made this current body of work. It will never be the same in my lifetime but that’s the importance of looking, of seeing it for what it has become. I love my forest, possibly more than I would have ever known. I will always go back to visit these woods, to paint them, to see how they heal themselves and transform. This current summer the woods had turned into a field of wildflowers.