Looking up has long been a way to orient oneself, grounding us in a sense of place beneath the anchored rhythms of sun and moon. These celestial constants persist across boundaries, as true in one place as they are in another, connecting us to something greater than ourselves. Ancient portents like solar eclipses, once feared as omens, may no longer foretell the end of the world—but perhaps we no longer need such signs.
In my paintings, I explore the intersection of personal perception and societal decline, a theme art critic Shana Nys Dambrot describes as "a darkly fanciful and increasingly multifaceted continuum of disaster and perception in storm fronts, fires, abandoned dreams, and other metaphors for societal decline, mediated by uncanny photographic intercessions.” Disasters—both natural and man-made—carry an unsettling duality: the devastation and powerlessness they bring, and the unpredictable shifts they impose. The theme of “portents” in my current work evokes this fractured world slipping away, a world that is rapidly evolving and elusive. A total solar eclipse, for instance, is an uncanny alignment that casts day into night, momentarily unraveling the fabric of reality itself…an experience both wonderous and deeply unsettling.
Annie Buckley notes in her essay for my C.O.L.A. project that I “transform the everyday into something magical, a feat, to be sure; but more important...is the way the painting becomes something that is neither here nor there, not the journey nor the process but a finite and distinct collision of light and time and memory catapulted slowly and carefully into being.”
In my practice, nature is documented through veils: lenses, car windows, thick fog, smoke, rain, and night itself become filters between myself and the world. When I photograph, I am fully present, less focused on clarity than on the experience itself. Often, it’s the imperfect images—those with lens flares, light leaks, and subtle distortions—that best capture the intangible sublime I seek. These photographic interventions speak to the fragility and transience of perception; they remind us that what we see is fleeting and fragile. Translating these captured moments into paintings, the image comes to life through the slow infusion of memory and time. The process reveals a world not as it seems, but as it feels—layered, impermanent, and as beautiful as it is unknowable.