My paintings begin somewhere—nowhere—in the American West. They are set in real places that don’t exist. They operate in a landscape where myth must contain fact, where promise and beauty continually grapple with melancholy and isolation. And in this landscape people have found reason to be busy, the results of which are staged for our consideration. In this work, I aim to access a range of regional categories and clichés including vernacular architecture, Manifest Destiny, the outdoor lifestyle, legends of the Wild West, even ecological concerns, but always from the flank and without verdict.

I’m interested in the wonder and inescapable strangeness of our interaction with this world, in the celebration and mourning of our ambition. I’m interested in this place I’m from and for which I have a deep fondness, in crawling inside the vast and loaded notion of “The West,” armed with all my experience, knowledge, reverence, fascination, preconceptions, misconceptions, outright ignorance, and running around like a grown-up kid hunting for things worth seeing—and then painting them.