Master of Fine Arts Thesis
Overcast
Haley Nannig
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design
Alfred-Dusseldorf Painting
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2020
Haley Rose Nannig
<Author>, MFA
<Name>, Thesis Advisor
2
Acknowledgement to the Universe
An image I took outside of my grandparents’ house of an image taken by one of them inside of their house.
. . .
I grew up looking at this painting in my grandparents’ house—it was the first time I realized a painting could function as its own visual language, leaving an impression words could not express. I loved the way the gloomy waves were painted, I still do.This piece and its lasting emotional impact undoubtedly informs my work about the ocean.
I found this old photograph cleaning out their house after they passed. It felt really serendipitous—like they knew how important it would be to me and loved the painting enough to document it on film, even though it lived on their tacky, wallpapered wall until their last breath.
I’ve taped it up every place I’ve lived since, and it was the first thing I did when I came home. Here I am, unexpectedly in their same house, next to the same ocean making paintings that have actually been about this painting and this place all along. It just took me 27 laps around the sun, traveling across the country, and flying across the world to find myself here—where it all started.
So much uncertainty lately, leaves me appreciating full circle moments. Never underestimate the power of an image or the force of the Universe.
. . .
3
Table of Contents
4 Words by Lucy R. Lippard 6 To Begin
11 Short Stories on Nature
In the Dark You are Small
What is Real is What You See
12 Leaning into the Unprecedented, Uncertainty, and the Hills
Taking What the Universe Hands You Nature Becomes the Gallery
16 “Wild Geese” - A Poem by Mary Oliver 18 The Act of Painting
“Abstraction Never Left, Motherfuckers” - Rebecca Morris’ Manifesto Chaos Theory - Process and Chance
Materiality - Liquid Color Hybrid Image
Means to an End
28 To Conclude 30 Bibliography
4
Amazing as it is from the rims, the commonest viewing
points, you have not been in the Grand Canyon without the descent into its underworld. Postmodern academic criticism argues that the whole world is packaged for us, that nature is no exception, and we never see what is before us without an invisible frame courtesy of the mass media or even the great art and literature. There is truth in that, but at the height of postmodernism’s popularity, we were virtually forbidden to experience anything directly, emotionally, or kinetically. If we did so, we were accused of being ‘essentialists’, ignoring the imposed frames, falling for the propaganda. However, those who have immersed themselves in the stewardship of western lands refuse to forego lived experience and close scrutiny, adding more not less strata to consideration of places like the Grand Canyon…
1
1. Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (New York: The New Press, 2014), 98.
5
Cairn, Largest Canvas 178x162 cm., Acrylic on canvas, 2020
6 To Begin
My understanding of nature is tied to my experience growing up by the ocean on the East Coast of the United States. Seascapes and landscapes became a part of my dialogue before I started making objects. I have learned through painting that based on your cultural lineage, personal surroundings, and experiences within the natural world one’s perspective is manipulated. To be clear, when I refer to perspective I do not mean the illusionistic space created in a painting or your emotionally charged opinions, I am referring to a physical experience in a space seen through your eyes: your point of view.
A person’s point of view while looking onto the world and existing within its
environments is inherited and learned, yet I feel throughout each individual’s life there is constant transformation, newness, and uniqueness brought to this scope through lived experience.
My initial investigation started by looking at American Landscape Paintings. This felt like the right path considering my origins and underlying interest in nature.
Researching my predecessors’ lineage and trajectory of these Landscape Paintings led me back to Europe. Again, this followed logic considering my European descent and half of my time spent painting in Düsseldorf, Germany completing this body of work. My goal was to question the long history of depicting nature within the medium of painting, traditionally represented through cropped and framed illusionistic spaces using paint on two-dimensional surfaces, and how these images have been influenced as well as helped shift and shape how humans have learned to see and perceive nature. Why is it that the tradition of American Landscape painting maintains such a specific, straight forward frame, yet other cultures' points of view and depictions of nature may take an aerial or layered approach? This is still at the forefront of questioning within my practice. Further, I have come to realize that nature is the framework from which my paintings and my Being function and exist within. Essentially, I am interested in ways of seeing. Instead of building something up through my paintings I aim to break visual moments down. How can I produce an object or multiple objects that force someone to think about their peripherals or reconsider their point of view while surrounded by tall trees that narrow when looking up but expand when walking through?
. . .
7 Being pushed out the door of my childhood home every day to go explore the outside world has significantly affected both my practice and my observations of nature and its structures. My favorite qualities about being next to the ocean or next to a mountain are nature's ability to shrink you and layer time, to make you feel small and caught up in a system much bigger than yourself. To me, being in the environment means freedom—to run through sand that pushes and slips away at your feet, to jump in frigid water, to hold your breath as long as you can, and to feel salt dry on your warm skin. In a lot of ways I try to remember the playful attitude of being a child in the sand while in the studio. Although my paintings originate from a personal place, my goal is to illuminate the relationships humans have with their environments and the shifts in our perceptions of nature throughout the history of its depiction. I am interested in the varying
understandings people have of the outside world, which I believe is directly connected to the lineage of how nature has been portrayed in religion, art, literature, and now social media.
What I have come to realize in my practice are the learned ways and trends of seeing nature in both past and present day. Producing images influenced by the
environment in the United States—its systems, forms, and natural phenomena—ties me to the tradition of American Landscape Painting, which is inevitably rooted in Westward Expansion. Views of looking onto “untouched” and “unexplored” land have been conditioned into an American way of looking at nature. I would argue that this tradition, of a single point of view gazing onto the picturesque horizon is still how humans in the United States most often view the natural world, but now the images are composed of tiny pixels on a scrolling social media platform versus oil on canvas. And prior to this, American point of view, in Europe, where the American Landscape painters found inspiration, humans feared going into the mountains because religion had taught them to view the landforms as blemishes on God’s surface; and as a result less mountains were depicted.2 What is most interesting to me is the correlation between these shifts in a
2. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and William Cronon, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997).
8 Western perception of nature and how as a result an image is molded. In my paintings I want to shift and skew this point of view.
Instead of gazing upon nature, I would suggest it is much more important for humans to submerge themselves within nature. To go into the trees, into the water, into the caves, and into the fields. In my paintings, I want to emulate this feeling—to simulate the intangible sensation of being next to the ocean, on top of mountains, or walking through a dark wooded path. By questioning the point of view within the painting as well as its installation in a space, I aim to simulate an overwhelming feeling of being within the natural world. I want to consider the nuances of seeing, not to gaze onto a landscape, but instead being dropped within the landscape of tall trees or open fields. Emphasizing that humans are a part of this network.
To borrow Mark Doty’s words:
I know that all of this might be taken as precious, a hymn to so much useless beauty, in an hour when the notion of beauty is suspect—when it seems to suggest a falsely bright view of the world, or a narrow set of aesthetic principles related to the values of those in power, an oppressive construction.3
With the current state of affairs and daily life as we know it on hold during a global pandemic, I realize circling around ideas of this archetype of beauty and nature can seem naïve and my access to the outdoors during these trying times is a privilege. However, to ignore this moment that feels as if nature is calling out to me to return home seems even more irresponsible.
. . .
I am also interested in exploring the complex relationships humans continue to have with nature in modern times. We scroll through feeds of enhanced and edited
images representing our environments, but rarely step within them. We create fake plastic trees, rocks, and plants to place in and outside of our homes, as if we know the value of being surrounded by natural imagery, but it is too much of an inconvenience to seek it in real life. I feel a back and forth tension between what is real and what is false has been embedded in our understanding of nature. In my paintings, I want to consider the aw-
3. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 66.
9 struck moments of being within the natural world, yet acknowledge the artificiality inserted and intersecting within these everyday experiences, blurring the line between falsities and purities.
. . .
All of these concepts within the realm of seeing, landscape, and nature fuel the start of my paintings, but just as important to my practice is the physical process and materiality within the work. Making the paintings is heavily influenced by chance and reaction, call and response. A large extent of my process has to do with my impulsive need to be doing something and my interest in experimentation. Again, I want to maintain a playful energy while working. For me, painting is about discovering something that you never knew existed, similar to walking up a trail you’ve yet to experience. Although nature and landscape play a huge role in how I generate ideas, shapes, colors,
compositions, and imagery, I am constantly reminded, through the act of painting, how intrigued I am with the medium itself—both its long history of depicting images and particularly its wide range of possibilities physically. What is most absorbing about painting is the ability to say and be multiple things at once within one surface. Painting can be about formal qualities that make up an image as well as intangible feelings, it records time yet when looked upon happens all at once, it can be an imagined scene with depth, or boiled down to just a series of shapes. My work, at times, incorporates mixed materials both in and outside of the frame. I am interested in the multifacetedness of painting and find myself walking the fine line between abstraction and representation, as well as straddling illusionistic space and objecthood.
. . .
My art practice is a marriage between my interest in the materiality and possibilities of painting and the evolving relationships humans have with the natural world. My physical act of producing an image is heavily based in process and the transformation of various experimental strategies and materials, some rooted in chance and others originating from multi-step approaches, all of which are embedded in the limitlessness of painting.
10
Midnight Oil, 160 x140 cm., Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2020
11 Short Stories on Nature
IN THE DARK
Ugly orange street lights reflect off the snow, illuminating my path.
A sheet of warmth shining from the tall sources meets a cool blue sky.
The hills between these two forces: a soft grey.
A dusky path.
I saw a person, it was a mailbox.
I felt someone behind me, it was the wind.
Finding forms in obscured pools of paint.
Shape-shifters.
Grasping on to moments of familiarity.
Pushing away the unknown.
Opposing forces, like the orange street lights meeting the dark blue sky.
. . . YOU ARE SMALL
Vast oceans, daunting mountains Towering over you, shrinking you.
Bluffs hold place for centuries.
We so easily forget—
A wave could sweep you off your feet.
. . . WHAT IS REAL IS WHAT YOU SEE
A Homegoods plant made of plastic that looks more factual than an actual plant.
A rock covering your well pump that has more vivid texture than a boulder that existed before plastic even came to be.
A square on a screen of never ending squares filled with every person’s colorful, curated views.
A blue glowing desktop screensaver that mimics your mother’s hydrangeas.
12 Leaning into the Unprecedented, Uncertainty, and the Hills: COVID-19
Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.4
With six weeks left to complete my two-year MFA program, traditionally
including a Thesis Exhibition and this written document defending my paintings, the world is being shaken by a virus that forced many to reconsider their reality and
readdress their priorities. COVID-19 is currently sweeping the globe, leaving people with a shared feeling of grief and more seriously leaving millions of people sick or dying.
With people scrambling to hold their lives together, it feels impossible to complete this document without considering the current crisis surrounding me.
When I first began writing about my painting practice a professor had brought up the idea of leaving a legacy behind. What will people get out of this text that is left and published in the library? What will someone think reading back on this say ten, fifty, one hundred years from right now? Like every painting, each one of these exhibitions and documents is a timepiece and capsule of the present that perpetually fades to the past.
Left in a file cabinet for one to enter into my world, my studio, and my headspace in 2020. And to be frank, 2020 is a year I believe will be looked back on and analyzed, considering the divided state of the nation, under a celebrity joke of a president, Donald Trump. Below, is how the COVID-19 virus has altered my world, my perception, and my point-of-view just weeks out from my (no longer) Thesis Show and how it inevitably continues to shape my whole practice.
I cannot help but focus on how much bigger this is than ourselves.
As if the earth got fed up with our bullshit and forced people to a halt.
To reevaluate their lives.
To sit with themselves again.
To slow the fuck down.
To appreciate the people and earth around them with gratitude.
4. May Sarton, The House by the Sea: A Journal (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company Inc., 1981), 14.
13 Just within months the environment is recovering and healing from mass pollution and anxieties attributed to our overworked capitalistic structure. So often we forget we are part of this larger system—Nature. We now face a microbial threat to health that affects all walks of life. I could not help but feel like the Universe was telling me something. To look within, to go outdoors, and explore my surroundings. To go into nature, the muse of my paintings, which I think about often and make work about always, but neglect at times to instead be in the studio. Nature is both the culprit and cure during this disturbance. It has infiltrated a collective consciousness that feels as present and heavy as the sands that cover our coasts and the mountains that weave across our terrains.
To fight this virus, we all must be in isolation and during isolation, we recognize the beauty of Nature around us that gives us solace.
. . .
Taking What the Universe Hands You:
I have always walked the line of cliché. Nature has always inspired me, I grew up on the ocean, and I have always enjoyed being alone, Etc. I was the type of child to sit in solitude on the beach with my journal daily, theorizing about the Universe. With the current state of the world, I have been forced into isolation and it has left me writing again, reading again, and walking alone through fields and beaches, breathing in the fresh air. In a lot of ways, this heavy moment has pushed me back into that blissful, naïve child; like the Universe calling out to me to come home, to re-center.
A lot of my paintings are about challenging one’s perception of nature. I exclude the figure with the intention of having the viewer enter into the work. Without a human for scale, one can experience the multifaceted terrain that could be reminiscent of looking up at the sky, being surrounded by trees, or pressed between rocks.The viewer becomes the figure in my constructed, artificial environment. I find myself wanting to produce these moments of solitude; coming face-to-face with nature and yourself, a bittersweet and familiar feeling personally, and one that I feel is being reconsidered by people around the globe during these times of uncertainty.
. . .
14 COVID-19 is doing to me exactly what I have always wanted my paintings to do for someone else.
. . . Nature Becomes the Gallery:
Coming back to Rhode Island to finish this body of work during a global pandemic has shifted my exhibition plans, this breadth of paintings, and my ideas of installation. I initially was making work to fill a large, white, sterile gallery space with paintings that forced the viewer to consider their point of view in nature. I wanted to paint skyscapes, hanging high in the gallery to force an individual to look up, place paintings on the ground to persuade one to look down, and overall disorient the viewer. I have reversed my mentality of bringing nature into the traditional exhibition space and instead have transformed the outdoors into the gallery. Objects have become shapes and layers that would typically occupy my oil on canvas paintings. The installation works have the same goals as the more traditional paintings. To shift a viewer's prescribed point of view, to portray multiple moments at once leaving the viewer to decipher the painting, and more formally—one of the painting's main agendas—to manipulate and create light.
The question of “what is essential?” has continued to surface. Who am I to go out and buy supplies at a hardware store while the government enforces laws against non- essential work and outings? Yes, art is essential. It heals, it makes up our culture, it is a language, but is the act of purchasing supplies essential in this chaotic time? I had to answer this question for myself and the answer was no. So, with every intention to continue producing for both my own sanity and the completion of this body of work, I turned to what was around me. I have used only the material I already had and utilized found objects within my grandparents old home. The same thread continues to run through my painting ideas, but the space and material has shifted.
Sails from my grandfather's boat were sewn together to create a “large canvas”
and foam blocks, which once floated a dock hand built by my father and grandfather, where substituted for traditional painting surfaces. These materials, so embedded with my own personal and nautical history, that I once ran from, claiming it was too cliché,
became the core of the second half of this body of work. I leaned into repurposing these materials that, for myself, were already packed with history and stories. I asked myself:
15 How can I take what I have, where I am, and spin it into work that was always meant to be made? And how can I transform nature into the gallery space where all this work was meant to be displayed? Ironically I am exactly where I need to be to wrap up this body of work.
Gathered Bits, Roughly 306 x 612 cm., Acrylic paint on recycled sail, 2020, Rhode Island
Cloud Block, Roughly 122x152 cm. foam block, Recycled foam, acrylic and spray paint, 2020, Rhode Island
16 Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
5
5. Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese.” (poem) Americas (English Edition) 48.2 (1996): 64.
17
Sky Grid,
Roughly 122x152 cm.
Recycled foam, acrylic and spray paint, tarp,
2020, Rhode Island
Droop, 100x180 cm.,
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2020
18 The Act of Painting
Abstraction Never Left, Motherfuckers Rebecca Morris’ Manifesto
MANIFESTO For Abstractionists and friends of the non-objective
BE A FORCE
Don’t shoot blanks
Black and Brown: that shit is the future Triangles are your friend
Don’t pretend you don’t work hard When in doubt, spray paint it gold Perverse formalism is your god You are greased lightning Bring your camera everywhere
Never stop looking at macramé, ceramics, supergraphics and Suprematism Make work that is so secret, so fantastic, so dramatically old school/new school that it looks like it was found in a shed, locked up since the 1940’s Wake up early, fear death
Whip out the masterpieces Be out for blood
You are the master of your own universe Abstraction never left, motherfuckers If you can’t stop, don’t stop
Strive for deeper structure Fight monomania
Campaign against the literal ABSTRACTION FOREVER!
6
6. Rebecca Morris, “MANIFESTO For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non- objective,” Berlin: ArtForum, 2006.
19 Chaos Theory - Process and Chance
In the same way, nature is always balancing and organizing itself, I find myself creating order and understanding out of chaos. The initial step in my process relies on a chance action, usually in the form of pouring paint onto a canvas lying on the floor. From that first impulse, the painting develops through a series of chain reactions constantly referencing landscape and trying to create spaces of memory and familiarity. The paintings are layered and built up similar to sedimentary levels that hold time within the earth’s surface. Through painting strategies, I not only work through altered perspectives of scenes within nature but also aim to mimic nature’s systems.
. . .
A lot of my process is tied to themes within Chaos Theory. I am not interested in the mathematical equations directly related to this theory, but more so the philosophical properties of this systematic study and how this connects to painting. There are a few key concepts to this theory required to understand it. First, Chaos theory is the study of process, qualitative features, or becoming, rather than quantitative outcomes, a product, or being. There is no certainty about what happens next and there is no aspect of
predictability. The theory’s foundation relies on the idea that a system is sensitive and that every element present at the creation of a system is integral to how it then evolves.
Many have interchanged Chaos Theory with the “Butterfly Effect,” a commonly used example that states if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil it will set off a Tornado in Texas. Chaos Theory is also interchangeable with nature, its connectivity, and natural phenomena.
In an article written by Dean Wilcox about the theory and its connection to David Lynch’s work the artist himself states:
You have to be free to think things up. They come along, these ideas, and they hook themselves together, and the unifying thing is the euphoria they give you or the repulsion they give you…You have to just trust yourself.7
7. Dean Wilcox, “What Does Chaos Theory Have to Do with Art?” Modern Drama 39.4 (1996): 11.
20 Although referring to theater I find this very relative to painting. One must function within her own set of rules and signs, which are combined to create a certain feeling within the work. One action or thought rolls into the next and so on until the whole becomes much more important than, but dependent on, the independent small parts.
In terms of my painting practice, I rely on the idea that one action leads to the next and the entire painting is dependent on the first moment of impulse. For example, if I lay down a wash on top of gesso that hasn’t quite dried due to impatience or wanting to catch the 706 train and I come in the next morning and this moment of chance or
“mistake” has created imagery that almost imitates digital print or a topographical map, that painting will develop from that one moment of impulse. Every future move I make will be affected by seeing mountains in separating pigments because of laying a wash on an un-dried gesso surface. Similar to a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas, my cumulative actions develop and grow into my paintings.
21
Look Out, 140 x 160 cm.,
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2020
Reverberating Abyss, 160 x 140 cm.,
Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2020
22 Materiality - Liquid Color
My paintings typically begin with acrylic paint on primed canvas and are later layered with oil paint. I am interested in the versatile nature and inevitably fetishized characteristics of oil paint, it’s rich pigments, and its ability to be smooth and thick like butter or thin and dripping like water. A lot of my painting process reminds me of and imitates Alchemy. At times paint moves poured and unrestrained across my surface, acting as and imitating nature. Other times the paint is built up of many layers, recording time of multiple previous paintings beneath the finalized work. Similar to the earth’s built-up levels, I am attracted to the way paintings can keep time.
I am interested in adding other materials into my paintings besides just varying types of paints. Texture is important to me and at times I incorporate sand and salt to create a gritty feeling. This juxtaposes with moments of smooth and glossy surfaces created through adding Galkyd medium to the paint. The varying surface qualities within one painting are important to me. Grit and gloss can also be contrasted by matte and chalky color created through thinned pigment and Gamsol.
In the last few months of my practice I have been incorporating printmaking techniques. For instance one work, Balancing Act, began with a small steel etching plate that corroded in an acid bath overnight. There is something really special to me about a process imitating nature, nature acting naturally, and employing chance. From that plate I inked and printed it through a press. I then scanned the small etching at a high resolution and edited it in Photoshop. That digital file was then printed with a large format printer onto specific paper. I then returned back to an analogue process, from which I transferred the large printed-paper onto polyester-coated canvas with a heat press. This process is called Dye-Sublimation. The printed canvas was later painted on top of, sand was added, and concrete forms imitating boulders were created to hold it up.
It is important in my practice that the paintings go through several steps or
transfers of information. One action leads to the next in the physical painting process, just as one strategy rolls into the next in the technical processes. This progression carries into the way I install my paintings in a space. I want the work to be in conversation with each other, as well as with the space. I think of my paintings as building blocks, each being a
23 piece to a grander narrative and dependent on each other to function. The painting
process does not end with the completed canvas; I want to be very considerate of the place and space it is viewed within.
. . .
Creating Balancing Act
24
Balancing Act, Roughly178x162 cm., Dye-Sublimation printing originating from steel plate etching scan, sand, glue, oil paint on canvas, spray-paint, concrete, chicken wire, 2020
25 Hybrid Image
Has anybody made abstract paintings that tell a story?
The two ideas need not to be contradictory.8
I am interested in exploring the in-between energy a painting can have that forces the viewer to question what is happening and to grasp for familiarity and recognizable forms. Is that an arm? Is that the sun? Could it be a landscape or a portrait? One is left trying to solve the painting and come up with her own conclusion. How can an artist create a painting with multiple forms of visual information happening at once? How does a viewer look at work like this? How can one surface and/or object convey multiple
“stories” or feelings or actions? Can there be windows into different times or memories in one painting? In my opinion many artists have found themselves in this position—artists throughout history and women I look up to such as Carrie Moyer, Charline von Heyl, and Amy Sillman.
In my own work I want to leave room for an image to be interpreted as multiple scenes, objects, memories, or points of views. For example, a map-like areal image could be read as viewing a landscape from high above or looking at the micro patterns in soil.
The hybridity of my paintings imitates the complexity and dual perceptions humans have of nature. A plastic plant or rock could be initially read as the natural objects they mimic or they could be understood as casted toxic material. The concepts and visual
characteristics of a hybrid image—paintings that leave the viewer questioning familiarity and recognizable moments, but still evoke certain feelings or phenomena—have always interested me because of their ability to be and say multiple things at once.
The new, more sculptural, installation-based paintings have hybridity to them as well. The objects painted can be read as the object itself or a surface painted to create moments of illusion. Paintings, which typically hold time and have a permanence to their existence, have become ephemeral in the installation pieces. The work only exists for the moments of documentation and can never be the exact same again. Wind blows fabric, water washes over objects, and the lighting continually changes. Hybridity is woven into the work in a new way. The physical installations are ephemeral and temporary, but
8. Lee Lozano, Notebook Entry 23, September 1968.
26 when documented with a photograph become permanent, mimicking the traditional time-
freezing nature of painting.
Grid-Scape, 178x162 cm canvas, Acrylic, oil, spray paint, mesh, 2020, Rhode Island
Day Dreamer, Roughly 122x152 cm. recycled foam, Acrylic and spray paint, tarp, mesh, 2020, Rhode Island
27 Means to an End
My work continues to take on different physical forms as I repeatedly investigate ideas surrounding nature, ways of seeing the outside world, the history of painting, process, and materiality. I am invested in feeling uncomfortable within my own practice, which most recently has taken the form of installing painted objects throughout seascapes in Rhode Island. I am constantly looking back and questioning my own work in order to produce the next projects.
Newness and experimentation is vital to my process, yet I have found certain strategies that have remained constant within the ebb and flow of my ideas and trials. It is important to me, whether viewed or not, that I maintain my more traditional painting practice. This is made up of making multiple oil paintings on paper daily as well as producing oil paintings on canvas. I find it meditative and telling to paint on paper. There is little restraint and it feels the most authentic out of my entire practice. There is a freedom in these paintings and openness to throwing it out and starting again. Not one portion of my practice could exist without the other. I am always finding new phrases in my painting language, whether that means paintings on paper or canvas, constructing fake cement rocks, painting on recycled and found material, or installing entire scenes within the landscape.
Sparks 1 & 2, 38x28 cm. each, Oil on paper, 2020
28 To Conclude
But “I” is just as much to be found in the world; looking outward we experience the one who does the seeing. Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.9
In conclusion, my practice is forever evolving and I realize my life, as an artist is a lifelong game of trying to fulfill constantly questioning my ways of seeing the world.
Throughout this body of work ideas crystallized, fell apart, and become clear again. New inquiries keep me painting most days. The uncertainty in painting and most recently day- to-day life leaves me with certainty that I may be questioning my relationship with painting and nature until the end.
. . .
What I do know:
It is easy to look onto nature from an outsider’s point of view, to feel separate and to never fully immerse yourself within it. Humans are lazy in that way. But what is more fulfilling is to step into the landscape, to feel its elements, and recognize your place in this system. I hope my paintings compel those who experience them to enter into the landscape, which indeed surrounds them. In 2020 this appreciation has been reintroduced to people while facing a global pandemic. My goal is to continue to construct different points of views in the environment through my paintings and I aim to strike chords of sentiment and familiarity.
Painting functions as its own language that is highly dependent on the artist’s own personal rules. A painting can exist in many forms beyond the canvas and I prefer to think of paintings as small pieces to a grander picture when installed in a space.
The physical production of a painting is something I am most interested in. The material is playful, it is forgiving, and it does not need to end with paint. The moments when you stop thinking and intuitively make moves are the very rare bits of time I aim for in my painting practice.
If circumstances force me into a space with no white walls and no materials, I will take trash and install it outdoors. Transformation within all of my work is key. What is
9. Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 67.
29 most important to me is keeping the energy-of-making high and using this language to communicate a feeling and sensation to other people that hopefully makes them consider the human condition and appreciate their place in nature.
You can not change who you are. If you like the ocean and the mountains, you like the ocean and the mountains. I want to dive into these archetypes instead of discredit them, which I have done for years. Indeed, clichés are clichés for a reason.
30 Bibliography
Doty, Mark. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
Lippard, Lucy R. Undermining : A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. New York: The New Press, 2014.
Lozano, Lee. Notebook Entry 23, September 1968.
Morris, Rebecca. “MANIFESTO For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-objective.”
Berlin: ArtForum, 2006.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, and William Cronon. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory:
the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.
Oliver, Mary. “Wild Geese.” (poem) Americas (English Edition) 48.2 (1996): 64.
Sarton, May. The House by the Sea: A Journal. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1981.
Wilcox, Dean. “What Does Chaos Theory Have to Do with Art?” Modern Drama 39.4 (1996): 698–711.
