ABOUT
I learn by exploring, and painting is just one mode of discovery, like pulling a fossil from the sand or a rare snake from the roots of its mangrove. These works recall the shapes and shadows of my adventures in the Arctic and the swamps of South, but in weathered chunks; I still come from a scablands where a volcano was scraped out and scumbled by floods and ice and grain combines. There and in this work, too, there’s a past left etched in flattened buttes, dark coulees, and a gravel of marks that ask forgotten questions about how a creature’s armor was imbricated and how humidity mussed the edge of a shadow.
My work in drawing and painting mirrors my interests in community built through narrative and science communication. I often merge the traditions of landscape painting, field guides, and comics to survey the lifeforms of an area, or to tell a story about human mediation of the environment. My recent projects examine human-established borders in conflict with vulnerable species, and have involved collaborations with the National Park Service, Fairchild Botanical Gardens in Miami, FL, the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville, FL, and the Hive: a non-traditional library in Spokane, WA, among others.