STATEMENT
My paintings approach landscape as a synthetic construction, simultaneously real and imagined. Their improvisational compositions overlay influences of Yuan Dynasty scrolls, Abstract Expressionism, and my mother's vintage décor. Since her passing I've been painting flowers and lattice in multiple ways: pouring them out, translating pattern, working from observation, or inventing. The shifting perspectives uphold my perception of landscape as the ever-evolving container of unlike elements.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s, I found the canyon down the street a counterpoint to my family's lavishly decorated, conservative household. Wallpaper doubled as God, surrounding and surveilling me; the plant and lattice patterns abbreviate nature as scrolls do. Projecting it as a backdrop for the canyon's river and rocks brings the two worlds together then, and now freeing the imagery in flows of color allow pour and pattern to flow together, complicating the surface and unfolding of time.
Each group of work compounds in the next. Doll paintings in the 1990s foretell the latent interest in landscape realized in Climb the Black Mountain (2004-11), which channels Chinese scrolls through a fantasy television aesthetic. My mother's lattice wallpaper appears in Nightclub Memories (2012) and her sofa fabric pattern inspires the landscapes of Bird and Flower and Unnatural Life (2016-17). Designing wallpapers for the prize-winning fair booth Notes on a Landscape (2015) and exhibitions Growth Cycle and Blooming World (2017) became free-standing lattice props in Effulgence (2019) , hand-painted mural and poured polymer lattices in Tempus Fugit (2023), and the bleacher-like table of Memorial Flowers (2024). Public commissions, prints, polymer pours, and scrolls expand my vision of landscape.