We have entered a new age in terms of the environment, in which climate change events like wildfire and flood threaten where and how we live. The recent, devastating fires in Los Angeles have brought this home all too clearly.
In summer 2020, as wildfires burned in my home of Northern California and the skies filled with smoke and ash, I responded by making large-scaled abstract paintings based on these conflagrations. My most recent paintings have considered atmospheric rivers, drought, and flood as well. With their brushstrokes, pours, erasures, and stains, they offer poetic expression of the disasters we are collectively experiencing, while also considering landscapes of safe harbor and renewal – the edge of the ocean, the desert sky at dawn.
There are direct echoes of my aerial photography in my paintings, in how they engulf the viewer and in how they are made. I create the paintings from above, the linen stretched onto a low platform on my studio floor. I circle around them continuously as I work, and there is no “correct” orientation – they are intended to work from any perspective. The paintings reference my own aerial photographs of the scarred surface of the Earth as well as the work of painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Bowling, and Sam Francis.
A recent series of four six-by-twelve-foot paintings reference the massive River Complex Fire, which comprised over twenty wildfires ignited by lightning strikes during a series of thunderstorms in Northern California. The titles of these immersive paintings refer to the stages of wildfire combustion and growth: Ignition, Flashover, Transition, and Smolder. Research into wildfire, and expression of it through abstraction and scale, are essential to this work. The research, however, exists to serve the emotional content of these paintings and the somatic experience offered the viewer.
As with all my work, I am looking to the destruction of both natural and human-made worlds, to ask questions about survival and loss, and about what we can attempt to control versus what falls beyond that domain.