Artist Statement

By utilizing landscape painting and printmaking as a vehicle for introspection and musing, I seek to pay tribute to the facets of nature that have witnessed my coming-of-age in my hometown of Poland, Ohio. The impermanent nature of memory, when supplemented with the ephemeral and fleeting nature of the environment, becomes a metaphor and a recollection – whether sourced from my childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. As is the case with human reminiscence, each artwork is not whole, suggesting change through missing information. The locations depicted in my work reference places I have constantly revisited throughout different eras of my life, which have grown, died, and transformed alongside me.

Driving my process are the constants of memory, ephemerality, tribute, awe, and personification. Within my work, I fight against the fogginess and lost clarity of my own memory, and long for the moments I feel have been torn away from me too soon. I wish to represent my history with the landscape symbolically while paying tribute to (and slightly personifying) the landscapes that have, in effect, raised me. By gathering inspiration on foot or bike, this body of work is sourced from the art of noticing, and thus paired with the solace these vistas have offered me. They coalesce to create a map of my influences, memories, and experiences.

By manipulating surface via the addition of water or subtraction via distression, the resulting visual disruption alters reality. Leaving parts missing provides a relation to what is unconsciously forgotten in the fashion of human recollection. The juxtaposition of presence against absence reinforces this quality. Allowing these facets of nature to envelope my memories calls to the methodology of metaphor. As a result, my work is not a perfect representation of a landscape, but a tribute of sorts to all that falls away with time. Distressing my substrates purposefully creates a sense of fragmentation and inaccessibility, forcing the viewer to stand in my shoes when facing a beloved landscape. My work serves as a means of expression where I may beautify the sense of grief and loss away without consequence, as a true escapist would, while reclaiming a sense of control. In this way, I become the cycle of nature, removing and adding as I please.