My best memories of growing up in Latin America are of exploring its supernatural landscapes. However, as formative as these adventures where, I find it hard to distinguish specific experiences from one another. The liminal space of memory has rather seemed to gel that period of my life together over time into one sort of common flowing sense of color. The sort of ethereal, glowing atmosphere that seems embedded in the settings of most classic Magical Realist works of literature that are inherent in my practice.

 

As special and personal as these experiences are to me, I believe that everyone experiences something similar. I see the landscape as a cultural identifier that stems from the collective experiences that we share in natural spaces. There is a psychological significance, a sense of home, that the places that have been, in one way or another, sacred to each of us live on in the form of memory. A phenomenon familiar to the poetry of abstraction – as details fade, something more essential begins to take form -- a sort of holistic sense of total environment. The spiritual sort of impermanence and uncontrolled transformation you find in flowing water, or the weather.

 

I paint the transformational landscape to reflect the way I experience it and to honor the colors, poetry, and biodiversity of my home country. Yet, it is the urge to explore such psychic spaces that my work seeks to invoke within those who participate with it. By way of a repertoire of more defined gestures, as a lure into the more universal world of color-field abstraction, I hope to beckon each viewer across the threshold of the substrate into an atmosphere that at its core is a celebration of the transcendental beauty found in the natural world around us. As if stepping over a hill into that mystic fog that serves to divide and collide space, except rather than a compositional device, it’s the main attraction. My work might escape traditional definitions of landscape art, yet stems itself from the atmospheric potential of Impressionist approaches and eastern perspectives that often inspire me. It conveys the wonder of an observable reality and presents a contemporary look at Romantic aesthetics through an abstracted impulse that is reactionary and affective.

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By using art as a proxy for shared experience, I am inviting viewers to take a hike with me through a vibrant and nuanced realm that is intimately linked to the spontaneous joy of being lost. To venture off the trails toward the personal relationships they might share in their own memories with such suggested places. Someplace warm and inviting. I would hope for this to be the kind of uniquely enjoyable experience that viewing art can provide. At best, perhaps it will spark within some viewers a renewed reverence and empathy for the sublime natural world we all share a role in nurturing at a time more important than ever.

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