Memphis is both earthy and atmospheric. Here humidity and pollution turn air to mass. Heat waves dissolve substance. The river appears to be dense and slow yet it is swift and deadly. Humans and the land coexist in uneasy tension.

I am interested in the spaces between things, the unnoticed marginal spaces in the urban landscape. Likewise, as a painter I like painting in that unsettling place between abstraction and naturalism. I find inspiration in ordinary urban places such as parking lots and intersections. I am attracted to the anonymous and ubiquitous concrete and asphalt backdrop one finds in television's Cops.

Merely imitating the natural world does not interest me. I am moved by the internal logic of paintings themselves, a world where things make sense somehow. Or almost don't. Where everything lives and breathes in tension held together by beauty and paint.

Pavement dissolves. Is it concrete or is it grass? Is it land or is it water? Landscape as we know it is mutating, disappearing. Anxiety, poignancy and sorrow join the traditional concerns of the genre. I am searching for something to love in this urban scene even as I long for the consolations of nature.

Trafficland

In January 2008 I began monitoring Milwaukee traffic cameras from afar. I watched as blizzards emptied the freeways of commuters and softened the geometry, blurring the edges of nature and culture. Empty space filled first with snow and sleet and then with private distractions. "Trafficland" is a series of watercolors based on those webcam images. It is a vision of the urban landscape mediated by the practical role of traffic cameras and the poetic inclinations of a solitary viewer.