Nature is an indifferent witness to our history and our conflicts, reclaiming ground without malice. Chaotic landscapes are formed through our increasingly intense face-offs. Collisions can be explosive, but extremes also provoke beauty—in the fractured world, the exuberant weed cracking the sidewalk, the ivy taking down a brick wall, the fantastical profusion and power of the wild world.

I often work with collaged images as grounds: laser prints of photos, studio cast-offs, cutouts from calendars, catalogs, books. This creates a layered compositional space; I might bury the images, but I feel their call-and-response with the paint and the alchemy that happens there. The picture plane is often in flux, the images might be a slow burn, but they are the provocation for the brushstrokes around and over them: circular cutouts of the vistas of a Bronx cemetery arcing over a landscape reinventing itself (“A Different Equilibrium”); a pixelated flower radiating under a full moon in May ("Flower Moon"); a chaotic landscape shooting a chain of orbs skyward ("Orb Tumble"); fragments of spray-painted paper and cutouts from a tropical fish coloring book vibrating in an underwater landscape (“Dive Deeper”); shots of a solar eclipse taken from an urban balcony rising as glowing bubbles from a reedy blue forest ("Eclipse Forest"); a psychedelic storm looming over a rising sea as it engulfs a pink mountain ("Neon Squall"); vacation landscapes convulsing around impossible animal sightings ("On Vacation, I Saw a Fish," "On Vacation, I Saw a Bird"); overgrown vines through a Rockaway warehouse skylight ("Radiant Breach); fractured landscapes accidentally pocket-shot (“A Weed Can Crack the Sidewalk”).

The "Pandemic Cemetery" series began during the COVID lockdown. I live within walking distance of Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx. Drawing there with another painter, masked and socially distanced, created a sense of freedom in a compressed situation. Colored pencils, charcoal, pastels, inks, markers, crayons—the contents of all of the coffee cans in my studio came into play, along with ideas about memory, life, and death. How we will look back on that time, and how it will change us.

“The Corpses” is an ongoing collaborative collage/assemblage series with poet Ian Ganassi, who I met when we were artists-in-residence at the Millay Colony. The series is a convergence of text, drawing, mixed media, and found objects that we have been mailing back and forth between NYC and New Haven, Connecticut, since 2005. To date, there are more than 300 finished pieces, with work in progress often in transit. (Website link in categories list.)

The “Books” series has wound intermittently through my studio life, reflecting my attraction to found materials and thoughts about the book as record. The pieces have become a kind of journal—fired clay from a Philadelphia ceramics studio, scrap wood collected while scrounging around the not-yet-gentrified Lower East Side, found objects from NYC streets. My ongoing immersion in collage and mixed media finds its most solid expression in these pieces. Many of the titles play with my affection for years of paperbacks I cannot part with.

Working in the studio in tandem with pre-existing images and materials transforms the world into material. Always in view—no matter the media—is that click of significance, when some thing becomes something entirely else: Richard Dreyfuss shaping mashed potatoes in Close Encounters, insisting, “This means something.”