I AM AN ANALYST. I use imagery of forest plants which grow all around us in the Pacific Northwest, with a goal to create spatial botanical worlds. These imagined landscapes explore scientific field analysis, art history and color theory. The forest is observable and measurable but being human in the forest is spiritual and unknowable. I love both conceptions.
I used to tell myself that I create order from the chaos of the leaves and branches I see in nature. But now I believe it’s my own limited perception that prevents me from seeing something beyond the arbitrary. There is a natural order to the way the plants grow, their density reflecting the available light and nutrients, their tracery reflecting their best bet to thrive. Plants even communicate through root systems, affecting the age and species mix. This is all more interesting than what I envision if all I do is look and simplify a scene as all artists are taught to do. Instead of reducing the forest into something I can understand and paint, I’ll look for a few compelling simple forms and then build something very complex with my art processes. Usually the layers reveal something mysterious and interesting I can react to.
I love art history and enjoy seeing the impact of my studies on my work. But unexpectedly, my interest in statistics and data science helps me just as much to create the paintings. I treat the forest as a huge dataset I am free to analyze, summarize and reenter, creating systems of groupings that vary with each new panel. I often think back to my 19-year old self, a quiet forestry student who noticed things about forest plants that still fascinate me today. I pivot between emphasizing the large dataset aspect of my forest paintings and creating harmonious gatherings of plant shapes in space, just as I did as a young forester. I hope my paintings will change with time as I gain a more scientific understanding of nature and a better understanding of myself.
This experimenting is endlessly fascinating to me. Every combination of ideas from seemingly separate bodies of knowledge is a great reason to make the next piece of art.
Hoh River Herbaceous Space, oil on panel, 40 x 40″, private