from: George Billis Gallery (L.A.)

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am not a landscape painter. My goal is not to depict the way light plays on treetops, but I do want to get inside to see the rings of the tree, explore the structure of roots and branches, understand the bark. Lately, I’ve been using maps to find my way. I was seduced by these obsolete weathered pages–their elegant lines revealing eons of geological shifts and erosion–all translated by human mind and hand. The risk I was taking and the implied violation inherent in putting my first marks on the antique paper was bracing. It brought drawing back into my paintings, erased the horizon line, and provided me with a ground on which to excavate and impose images. As if I am walking through nature with a magnifying glass and a telescope, I find cells, mushrooms, thunderheads; pebbles, cliffs, continents.

I tilt these flattened lands into the frontal plane and then I seek routes and valleys back into space. I’m hoping for vertigo. There is no one way to lose my balance. I follow a river with ink. I clog a harbor with oil paint. The name of a town or mountain might require something more literal–Rabbit Hills, Burning Spring. After the Fall of 2001, I found I needed to erect buildings out of the grid work of the maps. I could no longer avoid the human presence in my work or continue to invent a pastoral universe.

When I was 8 years old, I’d lie on my stomach in my bedroom and draw with colored pencils in ring bound sketchbooks. These drawings (now yellow with age) are full of monsters, winged beings, organic machines with gears and tendrils and bolts of electric current. Drawing on these old topographic maps with their sepia mazes returned those lost shapes and memories to me and provided me with a new framework for painting, a way to navigate space.