Don’t Get too Close, Oil on canvas 2026
Strange and Feral futures
I stand on the bluff at Cottonwood Park, a little riverside park in the middle of Sparks industrial zone, overlooking the great Truckee river. While I hunt for the best spot to photograph, my son finds his way down the rocks to the river below where the geese are making their nests. “Don’t get too close!” I shout, a premonition of violence flashing through my head as I remember the feral geese of my own childhood.
What if memory was as fluid as the river, encompassing not just the past but the future? The river of memory forks at hope and despair. My ancestors were restless and drove a reckless path here. Now as I overlook the great Truckee river, wind tugging at my hair, I wonder: will my children’s children come here? Will the geese threaten and posture at my family for generations? Grief for the future, the present, the past weighs heavily as I watch helplessly while my cousins destroy the planet, eyes set on other far off rocks. I hope my children’s children can learn to treat this land as though we intend to stay. I hope the river is still here for them to do so.
The beauty of the natural world undoes me. Like the magical realists I am struck by the extra-ordinary in the ordinary. Like the impressionists and the expressionists, I love color and light and paint. In my work the unconventional colors highlight the hazy space between memory and reality. Something happens between the brain, the eye, and the canvas, and the memory of a thousand rivers overtakes this one river.
Let’s build a bridge over the river of memory, from consumption to reciprocity and find a way to give ourselves back to the earth we came from. There must be a way to reclaim stewardship of the land, to act in symbiosis with the world once again. I strive to create something new: a strange and feral future. I hunt for this future on my canvas.
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Abundance
Oil on canvas 2026
This painting is a reenvisionment of another painting I did back in 2015. The original painting featured a young woman offering birdseed from her balcony. The bars of the balcony between her and the wide mountains beyond.
Finches have long been a recurring thematic animal for me. They remind me of humans in their ubiquity. I see them now in my garden, they are always pecking at the sunflowers. The juxtaposition in this painting of the boy offering food when they have plenty. They have no need for his offered treat.
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Don't Get too Close
Oil on canvas, 2026
Inspired by a trip to the Truckee river with my son, this piece serves as a cornerstone for the series.
What does it mean to throw caution to the wind and embrace the future? Can we think generationally instead of pulling the ladder up behind us? What if instead of moving fast and breaking things, we moved fast and repaired things? What does reciprocity mean?
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“I Can’t Reach”
Oil on canvas, 2025
I don’t think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the sun rising over Boca Reservoir. The sun refracting through the fog, while the sky held onto the darkness for a moment longer.
I combined this image with another I had captured, a toddler reaching up toward the moon in the sky “I can’t reach” she cried out. Her understanding of our own capabilities prevented her from realizing the imposssibility of what she attempted.
But we have reached the moon. What else do we think is impossible?
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With a Friend
Oil on canvas, 2021-2025
Initially began in 2021, this painting of a man and his dog began from a photo taken along Evan’s Creek Trail. The sagebrush all around him is buffeted by the wind. The colors of the desert come out in brilliant yellows and blues.
Our dry desert landscape is home to so much life and color.
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The Supermarket
Acrylic on canvas 2022
While originally painted before the rest of these were envisioned, this Nevada landscape was an early predecessor of the series. Painted from a rough plein aire sketch in Rancho San Rafael park, the Cattails in the foreground with stylized mullein at our feet, a field of wild wheat between us and the ever present mountains of the Sierra Nevadas.
Cattails are heralded as the supermarket of the marshland, as nearly all of the plant is edible. Mullein is also edible, although its fuzzy texture gives it limited usability. The flowers however make for a tasty snack or addition to a salad. As a known hyperaccumulator, its ability to draw heavy metals and toxins from the soil make it an interesting tool in our arsenal for re-terraforming earth.