To see is to breathe.

Or at least it is the same sort of experience. Each moment, we are taking in air as well as light, color, and forms from the world around us, and these things affect us, they move us, they transform us. At the same time, we are adding our breath, our thoughts, our emotions, contributing to our surroundings. When I paint, my surroundings permeate me; I dissolve into them. There is a continual shifting, an accumulating and evaporating of sensation. I reflect back out what I have taken in, I translate and transform it.

What I take in is the same landscape that is always outside my studio window, and yet it is never the same. How different yet wonderful is warm afternoon light as it slides across tree branches from the slipping, sinking luminosity as evening falls into night, and from the growing darkness as a storm blows in, pulling the trees to and fro as they helplessly dance in the wind. I, like the Romantic painter, J.M.W. Turner, am interested in conveying the fragile beauty that is in the light and the land, and in ourselves as well, because this sort of engagement with our surroundings is nourishing. However, I believe that this sense of being nourished by the land is being forgotten.

In our age, which is marked by an overwhelming amount of information, we have learned to shut out our surroundings in order to not shut down. In the process, we have begun to forget what it is to really be open, to be unafraid of letting our surroundings permeate us. In my paintings, I aim to create an experience where we do not have to feel this fear, but instead we can delight and wonder at life in its suchness.

So often our supposedly mundane experiences, like walking and seeing, go unnoticed amidst the chatter of our minds racing around, thinking of Important Things—of where we are going or what we are looking for. And breathing? It is supposedly the most mundane experience of all. It just happens, and we live because of that breath, that air, taking for granted its effortlessness.

(but how wondrous is a single breath when you feel it. and each one is always different, though the same—rising//falling//pausing. but you have to feel it.)

Similarly, we are forgetting the wonder of our surroundings—the trees as they stand rooted each day, quietly surrendered yet steadfast through the light and darkness, the wind and thunder, the heat and cold. We are forgetting the branches and blossoms that are so close, and the dissolving horizon that reaches out beyond. I paint these things so that we may come to them anew. Along with the changing light and weather that emerges in my paintings, elements of the here and the beyond, the open and the closed, and the seen and the obscured, continually arise. A joining of similar opposites also appears in the paintings of Edgar Degas and the photographs of Uta Barth, whose artworks resonate with me for their ability to at once present a here and a beyond.

To sense at once the close and the far, the known and the unknown is to be at once floating and grounded. It is to be in-between, awakened to things in their suchness and in their wonder. This wondrous suchness is here at every moment. It is your eyes on these words, it is the breath flowing in and out of your body, it is the light and shadow that surrounds you. It is this, this, this.