While painting I can recall actual visions in the context of my most powerful dreams and create a new object that lies between the things we can easily identify. Paintings may seem to project and recede simultaneously, and are capable of suggesting a timeless aesthetic even as they present a specific moment. For me these eternal moments arise from a tremendous variety of stimulus (dead trees, human hair, glaciers) but are connected by the flow of emotion that makes them significant: I care deeply about the beauty of the entire physical world and believe that aesthetic sensibilities are powerful and transformative forces.

This is my inaugural body of work as a painter. In this series I am letting go of pre-conceptualization. I have abandoned metaphor and symbolism in an attempt to liberate the magic of paint. Intuition plays a key role in this work, and I build my compositions directly upon themselves rather than by planning ahead. Aesthetically I do not restrict myself, but my natural tendencies are to synthesize from forms related to the landscape or flowing objects like water, wood, and veins. This series reflects an endeavor to see the world at large without an identification of subjects.

From July 17th to August 17th 2009 I backpacked from White Pass in Washington to Crater Lake in Oregon via the Pacific Crest Trail(solo, southbound). This body of work represents a small fraction of the beauty I witnessed in that month of looking, through the eyes of a Holga. Using a Holga encouraged me to focus on subjects closer than my previous bulk of landscape photography, and was nearly the opposite of shooting with the DSLR that I'm accustomed to. This photography represents a shift from 'landscape' to a more formalist conception of subject matter, where I start to regard light as the key factor in decision making. In this way it has directly informed my strategy in painting and aesthetic considerations in general.