The ideas for my earlier landscape paintings began with a road trip. While traveling between Charleston and Savannah, I was staring out the window at the landscape which was quickly passing by my eyes into a blur of colors and incredible movement. I came home and painted the images that were burned in my mind, trying to capture the openness and solitude of the land. As time passed, I found that I could no longer ignore the very real and disturbing events in the world that surrounds us all. Incorporating these new feelings and images into my paintings has changed my work completely.

     As I was painting what would become the first canvas in a new series, NPR News was blaring through the radio. Every half hour the heavy voice would bring me updates of bombings and attacks, each time the death toll rising higher and higher. As I was creating these serene skyscapes I became increasingly angry with what I was hearing and I began taking it out on my canvas. I started thinking about the beauty before me and the chaos that existed throughout the world; in every place of the globe people stood to lose all that they had and forget the innocence that came before. As the colors on the canvas became more vivid, the drawing developed into a threatening force that was on the verge of bursting. That was the moment that I decided to turn this painting into the first of 10 planned in a two part series. One side of the series will explore the introduction of instability into a previously beautiful environment of sky and clouds. The other side will examine a new form of clouds viewable in our now everyday reality of explosions, fire, and utter devastation.

     What started off as representations of space and lucid memories has now changed into an expression of anger at what is occurring around us and how helpless people feel about it being remedied under such an callous administration. But you can always find that flicker of light peaking through the dark clouds and with that, the hope to begin again.