LANDSCAPE (and event!)

Here is a photo of me holding one of my smaller landscapes in a landscape. I know this is a social media trope, but it seemed fitting because landscape is a kind of artwork that I've been making since I began.

Before I continue PLEASE NOTE!
If you are in Ann Arbor on June 11 and 12, please join me to see some of these works in the flesh at the West Side Art Hop. I will be showing at Cathryn Amidei's with four other artists and would love to see you there! 

Landscape started for me my first year out of undergrad at Brown, just after moving out from my mother's house where I'd been living. I didn't know how to start making art outside of the context of classes and senior projects and the things you do as assignments when you're a student. Without that structure I felt a little at sea.

By a series of coincidences, I found myself living within a few months living in a big open loft space that is now luxury office space in downtown Boston, but then was a rough, non-live zoned space with huge windows, plenty of heat, and a bright turquoise floor, off of a shared kitchen and five loft mates with similar spaces. It was $400 a month, sigh.

Landscape started then when one of my loft mates suggested that I just focus in on one thing and see where it might lead. I then made landscapes for years and years and sold all of the paintings that I made. It was an incredibly rich time. At one point I had a job that I quit so that I could just make my art for a year. I showed and sold most of that work. Over time, my landscapes became more conceptual and abstract, morphing into projects like Correspondence Project and like Draw Through It. The landscapes became the activity of writing turning into landscape turning into writing. At a certain moment the landscapes had the vertical red line of a lined paper margin, and blue lines across it. Landscape has continued throughout all of the other kinds of projects that I've done, and every year I always have a period where I return to landscape.

In 2019 I had a show in which for the first time I showed both landscape and total abstraction together. It was a delightful pairing. It worked beautifully together and was really freeing to put things all in one place.

Often I find that artists do this thing where they have certain rules of what is and isn't allowed for yourself and your artwork. I think I had the rule that 'you can't do more than one thing, and that if you did, it was problematic.'

I want to honor the abstract landscape in my work because I have many of them in my own home, in other people's homes and I value them tremendously.

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The natural landscape is a place I feel deeply at home and return to every day to birdwatch and forage for mushrooms, and to get bathed in green or brown or white and get perspective.

I wanted to make sure that you knew for those of you who have been collecting my landscapes over the years that I still actively make them. I make them with a new appreciation for the big open spaces of the midwest and the new bodies of water, the giant, ocean-scale lakes that I've encountered living here. I continue too to visit northern coastal Maine every chance I get and to be influenced by the landscape that I'm immersed in when there.


I wanted to share some newer work that I have made, and to let you know that it's available for sale and for exhibition, and some of it you can find here!

If you are in Ann Arbor on June 11 and 12, please join me to see some of these works in the flesh at the West Side Art Hop. I will be showing at Cathryn Amidei's with four other artists and would love to see you there!