Dates

Sep 17, 2026 -Nov 14, 2026

FOREST. Forests are the holders of ancient mysteries and we humans are deeply wired to respond to their spirit and being. Our language is full of descriptors that evoke that mystery - the dark forest, the forest in spring, the haunted forest, the winter forest - descriptions that come to us from childhood tales and cultural myth. The forests show us the signs of environmental degradation in our time, but also offer the means of hope for our futures as we learn more about the miraculous natural processes that they perform.

Artist Statement

The act of standing alone in the silence of a remote place – both as a human being and as a painter – is essential. It resets my senses as well as fueling my work. 

The wonderful nature writer Helen MacDonald (in her book of essays Vesper Flights) talks about how those moments open us to a glimpse of forces that are too large, too complex to comprehend. We sense the unknowable and we feel the unpredictability of things that are beyond our reach. As humans we are deeply wired to respond to both the power and the beauty therein. This potent source of meaning offers an opening, a glimpse of the vastness of the universal, and it triggers a deeply fundamental recognition. 

I am compelled by the patterns and structures, the skin and the bones of the earth. I want to be able to move from the examination of tangled roots in wetlands to the epic, aerial view of a glacier field. I want to feel the updrafts and temperature changes that echo the contours of the earth. People of the 19th century were deeply stirred by artists' depictions of places they had never seen, stirred in a way that scientific accounts and maps could not achieve. My hope is that my depictions of both the visual and the experiential memory of being where I was will cause others to consider, as I do, the beauty and fragility of our earth. My paintings have a strong sense of place and yet they are not realistic. Although descriptive, they do not reproduce the visual record so much as the experiential one. They inhabit a territory that lies between abstraction and realism. We all carry our own inner immensity. The landscape makes possible thoughts that we cannot and do not have anywhere else.

MPA's Fall Solo exhibitions are made possible through support from The O'Shaughnessy-Hurst Memorial Foundation.

Gallery