“When I was five or six years old, in the late seventies and early eighties, I would lose myself in the pages of National Geographic, Time Life books and Jacques Cousteau’s Ocean World. The often grainy, overly saturated, and highly contrasted images revealed distant lands of ice and penguins, coral reefs teeming with bizarre sea life, and expansive deserts exuding timelessness. The relatively poor quality of the photography and printing process allowed for my imagination to fill in what the camera could not record. Further, the images of far-off lands hinted at an unexplored reality ready to be traveled. 

About thirty years later while teaching at MiraCosta College, my design class was working on a project involving collage. Amongst the scattered magazines were older National Geographics from the seventies and eighties. I was enchanted and collected some of the images I found there. Over the period of a few years, I amassed binders full of images torn from magazines and stacks of coffee table books of landscape and travel photography. I sifted through them looking for images that resonated to me, a bizarre sky color, the certain artificial glow where mountains meet the horizon due to some bad printing process, etc. Looking through these pages was like visual dessert, a break from the constant problem solving of my artistic practice. 

In 2015 my mom died of lung cancer, a month later my grandma passed from pneumonia in much the same fashion. I was emotionally and spiritually exhausted. Confounding this were the constant technical issues from my work as a contemporary artist. Needing a break, I decided to return to my native tongue, landscape painting. I first made oil paintings of images I collected, but rather than a strict photo realistic portrayal, I rendered the images as I would a traditional landscape while keeping the idiosyncratic qualities of the photographs. Wanting to ground the paintings with a more concrete process, I paired the representational works alongside paintings created with the paint used in the representational paintings. The pairs consist of a representational landscape painting and a painting created by the paint of its companion. For me, the resulting paintings occupy a space between traditional landscape painting, fantasy and the imagined or idea of a place.”