With a focus on animals, nature and landscape, Re-wilding is a series of paintings aimed to connect us with our wilderness as well as touch on our own personal wildness.  I spend time in the mountains and forests and find that is when I feel most whole, most alive, closest to whatever unknown forces exist around us.  It is where feeling both powerful and strong as well as miniscule and humble co-exist for me.  The landscape component of my paintings touches on the vastness of land and space and the desire to see what is around the bend, just over the next hill, the next mountain.

I use imagery of wild animals to represent both the fierceness and vulnerability that we can embody when out of our constructed habitat of buildings, roads, cars into the wild with weather on our faces and earth under our feet.  It does not need to involve climbing a mountain, it can be as simple as bare feet on soil or turning your face to the sun, living with intention, vulnerable and imperfect.  I want my paintings to be a reminder, a call, to get out, explore, be brave, and re-wild… to spend time in a less cultivated state, to re-introduce our human selves to the land with respect and awe.

Favourite Places I've Never Been

My ever-growing series of paintings, Favorite Places I’ve Never Seen, is based on places both real and imagined. Each piece is a landscape, with a layer of fantasy. I work with an idea of a specific place I remember from personal experience or a story or photo or occasionally a dream, then embellish the place in my mind into something magical and unknown until it becomes it’s own place… it’s own world. I am not interested in any place in particular, but instead in the feeling a place can evoke. Places that are seemingly deserted, but upon closer inspection turn out to have traces of habitation, create a sense of wonder about the lives that have touched the place. It is this curiosity and mystery that I aim to capture in each painting.