Mountains are destinations, either real or imaginary but usually faraway, standing for an alluring inaccessibility between land and sky.   They are the quintessential symbols of 19th century transcendentalism - the last gasp of romanticism before the modern age.   In my paintings, distant mountains come to the surface and fall back again into folds of abstraction.   They are fleeting narrative moments - destinations for the eye, but they are also abstract shapes themselves, pushing up against the picture plane.   If there is a wholly American optimism in my work, I subvert it through painting's inherent awareness of its own troubled history.  

My paintings generally begin with an image: Mount Shasta, the volatile geological features of Yellowstone Park, an early modern skyscraper. Sometimes raw, sometimes digitally altered, these structures form part of a larger pool of subject matter: photographs, drawings, and text.  I am interested in juxtaposing various stages of abstraction (pixellation, spontaneous brushwork, distortion) as a means of moving back and forth between the source and a more ambivalent state of being.   In the mind, personal memories are experienced alongside history, fiction, and film.   Sometimes they get confused.   As these elements are woven into a painting, like colors, they mingle, fuse, and overlap. This ambiguity is reflected in the flickering relationship between paint and image: each being a vessel for the other.