"D a y l i g h t s"

College Landscape Archive

2001 - 2002

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After my sophmore year in college (1999/2000) I felt like I came to the end of a chapter with my art. After 3 years of working on a large body of conceptual work that was mostly mixed media I felt artiscally drained and burnt out. The intellectual exploration of my freshman & sophmore years work was something I needed to do as an artist, but after coming down from that "intellectual high" I realized that the art I was doing was becoming either too self-indulgent or overly symbolic with "meaning" & personal ideas. See at the time I came to accept that good art should not only express an individual's own feelings and psychology but it also should say something about the human condition as a whole. I wanted to create art that was deeply personal but also made serious social commentary through surrealistic imagery and found objects. The personal parts were about me entering adulthood, discovering nostalgia for my own past, and coming to terms with the true nature of imagination & creation. I learned that my imagination results from an interplay between memories, feelings & found images. And that the interplay and mixing of these things are dictated and altered by my subconscious mind for different reasons. The social parts were about human life as a whole being altered through technology & media. Overall I think this introverted work really helped me discover myself as a creative & intellectual person but in the end I wasn't making the art that would define my career as a working artist. The work was simply too dark!

So after the summer of 2000 I started my junior year with one goal in mind, to focus on my college work and nothing else. I was majoring in illustration so I wanted to see if I really could engage myself in the hopes of doing it as a career. But unfortuantly I realized pretty quick that I wasn't cut out for it and I didn't have the drive to develop a personal style that was suitable for contemporary illustration & design. I really just wanted to return to straight painting and create visual pleasing art. Plus I met my first serious girlfriend that fall so I had another reason to get out of my head and cheer up. For the work that I had to do for class assignments I decided to take on projects with fantasy like imagery. Much of this was inspired by the fantasy illustration that I was exposed to back in high school. So in a way I was going back to my roots but realizing that I didn't have new strong drawing skills made my class work frustrating. In addition to my illustration & design classes I also had my first photography class that year which also forced me to take notice of the outside world.

I don't remember exacly when I started to focus on landscape painting but it started that school year. (2000/2001) I really just liked the feelings that resulted from appreciating the outside world and a sense of place. Most of these first paintings came from fragmented memories or my imagination. I remember doing four 12x16 inch paintings of the woods behind my childhood home. Of course working from memory and imagination resulted in embellishment. It wouldn't be until the fall of my senior year that I would take my first and only landscape painting class. But by then I already had painted dozens of works and I realized I wanted to take a personal approach to landscape painting. It was hard doing plein air painting for that class because I wasn't used to being told what and how to paint. (I only took one other painting class before that which was back in 1998) Plus painting outdoors can be very frustrating for acrylic painters. Getting supplies and setting up at the locations was a challenge to do but it was also inspiring. So from spring 2001 to summer 2002 I painted over a hundred landscapes. Some works were more traditional than others and some were real places. I really was inspired by Lake of the Isles and I did many paintings from it. I rediscovered the joy of pushing paint around but I also wanted to inject a sense of contemporary design, surface texture & fantasy into the works. All of the intellectual and pyschological experimentation & energy that I had the 3 years before was not completely lost, I just redirected it to create art that one can escape into. I rediscovered my abilities to express light and space. I concluded that creating art that anyone could appreciate is what I wanted to do. Plus I learned to accept and experiement with my decorative impulses which has resulted in what I do today for a living. When I look back on the works below I have fond memories of creating them and the feelings they evoked. For me these paintings are about escape, reflection, emotional light, appreciating nature, and that in the end the luminous land is the default of earthly life. Some paintings are aweful but all of them are fresh with inspiration and the exuberance of doing something new and happy!

(May 16th, 2007)