For my current works on paper I layer watercolor and ink, based on color, viscosity, and texture, onto a white background to form the landscapes of my anti-story. Eyes connected by tendrils to high-gloss enamel mouths within the landscape become characters and monochromatic houses and telephone poles are woven into the compositions to evoke a kind of once-upon-a-time mythical world that is both playful and disquieting. This series is inspired by my childhood in the rural American South of the 1970’s and conveys the interplay between the remembered physical landscape of that time and my emotional landscape past and present. My hope is that these anti-story paintings would reveal an illuminating narrative cut, as if a flash bulb pop across the space of an implied narrative, allowing for a pause in order to engage the viewer to give them some time in this space, to figure out the story, or to pretend a new one. “Many of the narrative paintings in this selection have rejected solipsism in favor of a more direct, more relatable manner of storytelling, or of shaping a subject. In the best work, there is an alchemy of realism and generalization, of detail and abbreviation, of timeliness and timelessness.”
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