How this plein air painter discovered meaningful work in the studio.

The paintings in this collection were born in the studio from photos and memory. As a seasonal plein air painter, I’ve always had a begrudging relationship with working indoors during the cold winter months. When I work en plein air I invent color and shape in an effort to simplify the excess of visual information, but in the studio I invent for entirely different reasons. A photo of a landscape is a distortion; edges have been cropped and color drained. Forms are flattened and fixed in place. I approach this attenuated version of the landscape with generous detachment, making use of memory, sketches, and improvisation, often in conflict with each other, to satiate my need for disorder. In creating these winter landscapes, I sought to bring the seductiveness of plein air painting into the studio, to respond to conflicting records of the landscape and organize them into a single representation driven by color and mark making. The complicated landscape is simplified, then re-complicated, and simplified again – a translation of landscape imagery — a solo game of telephone.