My paintings are about the irreconcilability of wilderness ideals and urban experience. I use figure and landscape to explore desired but impossible connections to woods and waters. These images reflect the detachment of my back-to-the-land upbringing from a paved-over present. I identify with the figures I depict and involve my body in directed and spontaneous gesture. I hope to make the construction of paintings visible—fluid, layered, and coalescing. The narrative includes acts of looking and searching; human and animal forms move through stacked spaces of the imagined and observed. Color keeps the ominous and the exhilarating closely linked, like the bright cast and dim light just before a storm.