Artist Statement

My work during the last decade is sourced from trees, both those depicted by the 19th-century artist Thomas Cole and those found in the Hudson Valley where I live. I believe that Cole anthropomorphized his trees in order to use the viewer’s natural empathy for humans and animals to create a new empathy with nature as a whole and thereby advance his proto-environmentalist views. In my work, trees serve as vessels for the viewer’s assumptions about age, beauty, knowledge and strength in order to explore those norms and beliefs. In my experience, both in museums and in the studio, tree-based imagery has the power to bypass our learned cultural and societal biases and expose those biases to ourselves. Read more.