Artist Statement - Psychedelic Impressionism

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.”

—Henry David Thoreau

For a long period of time in my life, I did not understand what the human spirit was. Bent over in my mind by the happy carefree nostalgia of my endless childhood, I was paralyzed with the complexity and betrayal I had seen in my adolescence. To me, our society had placed importance and urgency on all the wrong parts of life, and people formed and reformed in front of me while I was left wandering along, still searching for that completely sublime state. It was a fearful existence; as if what I was doing held little significance in the fast-paced ever-changing technological machine bone framework of my home in Rochester, New York. I rejected this existence, spending more and more of my time outside in nature, engulfed in the serenity and beauty as the forest or the sky opened up and revealed parts of my own soul to me – and I found that the human spirit, my spirit, was no more inside of me than it was floating around in the vapor of a cloud, or hollowed out in a decaying fallen tree trunk. The burning golden colors of a sunset on the lake broke my heart more than any person ever could, and I reminded myself of this fact every time I felt betrayed. So I am full of these emotional responses to nature and the feeling that they hold parts of my fragmented soul, full of their conversations and memories, full of the constant realization that there could be nothing more true in my life.

I try with every force of my imagination and observation to put this raw unstoppable possibility into my paintings. At many points, experimentation became a relevant part of the growing process with this series, pushing my paint to achieve different unique styles and speak to forms that may or may not completely reflect the physical reality. I was more interested in perceptions and evoking a sense of nostalgia or emotion. Light and color have always held fascination in my brain, and become key factors in all of my work, with special emphasis on color. I love to manipulate color by implementing my belief that every color is everywhere, but in various stages of vibrance and subtlety. Texture was a vital part to every piece as well, and largely part of my experimentation with medium and application. I used a palette knife to layer paint and create different scraping patterns and textures all across the surfaces, resulting in thick, raised paint globs, and something that I like to call “color islands.” Color islands are how I describe the relationships I was able to create as a direct, fast, almost accidental result of the colors on the knife combining and changing. Building compositions this way was both fun and challenging, as it took a long time to arrange the color islands in a way that spoke to the forms being represented, the emotions within the forms, and my spirit within these emotions.

Finally, as I studied the masters of impressionism such as Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézzane, Van Gogh, Morisot, and Cassat, and thought about the changing world around me, I devised a plan to re-invent impressionism again in my own way that speaks to an immediate use of color and plat-formed layers of paint; bending reality as I saw necessary, and behaving as Thoreau said, “fluid to the influence of its spirit,” and the spirit within myself.