I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

-Carl Sandburg, “Prairie” from Cornhuskers, 1918

There is not a more dominant force behind my work than the open prairie of the Midwestern landscape. It has become an aggrandized mother figure of sorts, a place whose calmness and emptiness is a welcome escape from the everyday. My yearning for this solitude manifests itself in two distinct bodies of work — serene, minimal reflections on the landscape itself, and darker explorations tied to the longing for it.

some words on the amelia and josephine pieces on this site…

summer 2009

This past fall, my wife and I became parents of our first child – a beautiful little girl named Amelia Blue.  During the first few months of our lives together, I'd watch her dream as she'd take many mini-naps throughout the day.  There would be rapid movement beneath her eyelids, she'd give a little kick here and there, and I would smile as I'd wonder what such a young child could possibly be visualizing in her mind's eye.  It wasn't long until doodles of mine began to incorporate fragments of Amelia's quilted blankets — a signifier of her tranquility, comfort, and contentment.  As spring awoke from a long winter, these little sketches developed into large paintings that were unlike my minimal landscape works.  The bright colors of our flower garden and my peculiar fondness of the rabbits in our backyard (the latter heightened by my re-reading of Watership Down for the nth time) started to make their way into thoughts on new pieces to create.  I was in full fantastical, whimsical art-making mode — a place where I imagined my daughter dreaming of flying around on her magic blanket with the neighborhood rabbits as her copilots, laughing it up as they explored the sky.

It was during this same time of birth and growth that my paternal grandmother Josephine's health began to slip away.  Out of all my grandparents, Josephine is the one who woke me up and fed me before school, watched me after school, and cared for me when I stayed home sick.  She is dear to me, and watching her liveliness fade has been heartbreaking.  If the emotions related to Amelia's first months are simple and direct in that they are forever tied to the verdancy of Spring, thoughts related to my grandmother's impending passing are more complex, for they traverse back and forth from warm remembrances of cherry tree blossoms falling to the ground, to the dark days of a bleak, desolate winterscape where nothing grows.