Wind, Water, Smoke
I am currently working on a series of paintings of wind, water, rain, steam, mist, and smoke. I start with an absurd idea (“what if I make paintings about things that are hard to see”), and then take it as far as I can, looking for variations of it in everyday life. With time, the stranger and more interesting examples of the idea start to come forward. I painted a hand mixer aerating a bowl of cream (Soft Peaks). It struck me as the process of adding wind to cream. When asked about my work, I love being able to say something like, "I'm just making paintings about the wind" or "I’m painting a lot of puddles lately." My work has always been about painting things that are hard to see-- things that are both easily overlooked and also difficult to visually capture. Strangely enough, painting is the best medium for capturing these subjects. It is visceral. It looks wet even when it isn't. The magic of paint is that it is just dust suspended in oil and somehow it reaches through millennia to show us some fleeting thing that we recognize as ourselves, as familiar. A hand print in a cave, a hieroglyph, a freaky little medieval dog, all just iron oxides, (or rust). Painting is turning rust back into mountains, (or clouds, velvet, trees, or cream). It is turning entropy back into order and it is a miracle.