FAQs

What is your major influence at the moment?

So much of my work is influenced by the environment and the many challenges that we face as a planet today. When creating a piece, I often base it around an event or climate disaster that has happened recently somewhere in the world. My goal is to compose imagery based around these ideas that highlight the event through the lens of landscape painting and create a seductive and beautiful image that draws the viewer in and encourages them to learn more about the inspiration for each piece. Through this research I learn about the specifics of the environmental events and use them as iconography throughout the piece. For example, in my piece Cathedral of the Woods which I created in January 2020, I was inspired by the events of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire in 2019, the sweeping media coverage that seemed to overwhelm my feeds at the time, as well as the tragic and record-breaking forest fires of 2019 that swept through Australia, and the West Coast of United States whose damage and impact was often overlooked. This imagery inspired me to create Cathedral of the Woods in which I seek to capture and sanctify the multi-tonal light cast through the silhouetted trees, reminiscent of stained glass. Merging three moments, before, during, and after the fire into one scene I work to highlight the awe- inspiring beauty and devastation encapsulated in the forest post burn. This desolate moment is seen through the eyes of a lone Jackrabbit emerging into an unrecognizable landscape that it once knew as home. The still truly wild places, that admittedly are disappearing more and more by day, are the places that truly inspire me most. Those places that you can interact with the raw beauty, ferocity, danger, and gentile spirit of nature and feel small, like that jack rabbit. Those wild places where I can feel alone surrounded by such power that's what inspires me. and through my work that's what I hope I am able to show people and help them connect with. I guess my hope is my viewer can feel that inspiration that motivates me. I hope that my work inspires people to look deeper into those pockets of pure nature that still exist and be aware of the moments that we intrude on them and poison them with our machinery and our power supplies and our constant need for growth. Growth is good but only when it is done with respect for the home that we exist on and share with so many other species. I hope that my work allows people to have an emotional empathy driven connection to these events affecting our planet, and the few still truly wild places.

Nature and hidden information seem to be important themes in your work, where does that come from?

I grew up on Oahu in Hawaii, and being surrounded by such a lush but fragile island ecosystem instilled in me a reverence and respect for the environment that I treasure to this day. Within my lifetime I have witnessed the beaches I grew up playing on disappearing, deforestation, rampant mono-cropping, and planetary disregard for the environment which has lead us to this pivotal point in our planets history. These are all things that I am thinking about while creating my artwork, but at the same time I am aware that these are anxiety inducing and difficult topics to bring up. The more I learn and the more science develops its understanding of the environment I think it's just so miraculous the way that nature communicates subtle information. I think that the environment is the ultimate teacher of hidden information. If you look at plants and the way that they communicate with each other, and coexist in an environment that is constantly evolving, you can really start to see these intricate relationships, battles, and conversation playing out on micro and macro scales. We're finding out now that trees communicate with each other through basically a mushroom network that connects roots throughout the forests. They pass nutrients to each other and can warn each other of fires or infestations occurring miles and miles away. This sort of indirect communication and connection between these entities in the forest really reminds me of our intricate connections as humans and all the non-verbal ways that we communicate and connect with those around us and the environments we are in. I try to weave information into my work in efforts to communicate with my viewers the subtlety and importance of the environmental messages I am conveying. I want to emulate that subtlety of communication and warning seen in the natural word in order to lure viewers into an empathy driven response which drives their curiosity in learning more about the environments I am depicting.

How do you approach atmosphere and color?

Creating atmosphere and a feeling of light and air in the pieces I make is something I am constantly trying to understand and push. Nature does such amazing things with atmosphere and color, like the way mist rises off a forest making it look like it's breathing and rising into the soft light that radiates through the vapor touching every tiny water particle in the air making the clouds look like they are glowing from within. Im so fascinated by that otherworldly movement and glow that happens under the perfect conditions in nature. A lot of my work talks about those imperfect but still beautiful areas where humans interact with wild places, and the effect we have on plants, animals and landscapes there. I will often travel and hike into National Parks land, or follow forestry roads and camp in areas that are more isolated. In these places you can see the way roads or power-lines cut across the landscape like scars, and the ways animals and plants have so powerfully adapted to our dominating force on their landscape. I spend time looking and interacting with the environments there. Noting the animals that wander though campsites, or following burn scars up mountains. Documenting and researching these environments I am in is very important to my work, and when I translate these environments into a painting, I work to emphasize the colors, plants and emotions specific to the areas that I experienced. My recent piece “Bathed in Red (SF 9/9/2020)” is inspired by the apocalyptic red skies that blanketed Northern California in September 2020, due to record-breaking wildfires. I spent that entire day driving through Golden Gate park and around San Francisco taking photos and sketching the way the red-orange light seemed to make every green tree and plant appear almost black, and how the thick smoke in the air mixed with the fog, creating an orange-brown haze you could feel on your skin. In creating “Bathed in Red” I wanted to capture that otherworldly, dangerous, and yet beautiful feeling and the colors produced by smoke and fog blanketing the area. Color and atmosphere are so mesmerizing and powerful to me, and in my work I’m often inspired by a color or feeling that I use to evoke an initial reaction to the piece, and lure the viewers into a deeper reading of my work.

Is there a particular image or idea you’re obsessed with?

I have recently been fixated on creating beautiful disasters. Ever since I was first exposed to painting I've been so interested in the romantic era of landscape painting. These images of pristine Yosemite Valley and beautiful untouched wildernesses are so inspiring for me throughout my artistic journey, the idea of the Sublime, and the duality of beauty and deviation encapsulated in nature. But I think so much of this era of painting is fueled by colonialism, stealing of native lands, industrialization, and idealized imagery of landscapes. Still, these images are profoundly influential over the aesthetic concepts that come into my head when creating a piece. So rather than fighting this impulse, I try to make my paintings evoke this same beauty, subtlety, and power seen in the romantic era of landscape painting, but shift the focus from idealized landscapes to those places and moments where humanity intrudes on nature and it results in a disaster.