The depiction of nature and landscape through painting, film, and photography is an entryway into our understanding of nature and landscape, but my paintings add a unique layer to redefining Landscape Painting and Land art in the 21st century. It is in our relationship with landscape and nature that the genesis of my painting begins, and I want to know what nature and landscape are now that we can control and manipulate both.

My painting practice focuses on wildfires, using Wildfire Retardant, a brilliantly colored material dropped from planes upon the land to aid in the control of burning wildfires, as my primary painting medium. These works are not about pictoralizing a wildfire; they are about becoming a wildfire. I ask the question, “If I were a wildfire, how would I burn? Where and what would I burn? What do I look like? Am I burning through a valley or up a mountainside? Are the winds pushing me towards a river to extinguish my massive reach?

Embodying oneself as a wildfire is a fantastical and abstract thought. That, too, can be said of creating artworks using wildfire retardant, but abstraction is the core in these paintings - focusing on visceral and elemental force. Each work poses a feeling of flatness, visual uncertainty, and physicality. The removal of spatiality moves the work towards abstraction and puts the viewer in the work or as a wildfire. Visual cues of trees, forests, and landscapes can be made out in the work, but removing horizon lines or pictorial spatiality is important to me. I feel they offer safety and distance, and safety and distance are not what I am interested in.