Zen Buddhists say words and images are inadequate to describe life and our experience of life, because they do not express the full truth. But words, images and sounds are the tools we are given and therefore we make an attempt to talk about the truth of life as best we can. It is the interaction and merger with nature reflecting the human that attracts me and creates a hybrid view of reality through my images. My paintings are an attempt to reveal the truth of my life. They act as visual journals and reflect my environmental concerns.

My images and methodologies reflect our collective, yet contradictory impulses and inclinations - indulgence, and denial, obscurity and revelation, the carnal and the cognitive. A celebration of complexity, they seek to present a world that is physically provocative, unapologetically poetic and undeniably beautiful.

I grew up on the prairies of South Dakota. The land there does not start or end but expands across miles of rolling plains and under the vast expanse of sky. With the great absurdity of everyday life taking place within these extraordinary distances, the people have adjusted to the prairies. This is reflected in their humor--dry, deadpan, self-deprecating and their manner--stoic, flat, and fixed in the present.

My recent paintings continue my interest in the problematized psychological relationship between humans and the natural world. I am utilizing the genre of landscape painting to suggest mystical, invisible worlds that parallel our own, often depicting colonization and escape from a desertified electrical planet. The color fields exhale atmospheric spaciality that are filled with imagery of oversized silhouettes of microscopic life and of plastic garbage in contrast with miniature silhouettes of humans. A recurring image in this series is developed from a diagram of the internet.