Experiences in the landscape rarely remain intact. Although we often recount time spent outdoors as a sequence of events, memory seldom preserves those moments as complete images. Instead, recollections emerge through fragments like a change in temperature, the smell of sagebrush, the sound of moving water, a conversation, or the color of light falling across stone. These sensory traces surface unpredictably, continually reorganizing themselves rather than returning as fixed pictures.

My paintings investigate this provisional nature of perception. Rather than depicting a singular place, they assemble visual fragments that overlap, interrupt, and reshape one another. Distinct moments occupy the same space, allowing remembered experiences to merge with imagined ones. The compositions resist a single narrative, instead pulling in uncertainty as an essential condition of both memory and seeing. Painting becomes less about representing a landscape than about reconstructing the way it is experienced over time.

An important point of departure has been Michael Barnsley's work on fractal image compression. Rather than treating an image as a static picture, Barnsley's models describe visual information as a set of relationships capable of generating increasingly complex forms. While his work was never intended as a theory of human memory, it offers a compelling model. If remembering is not the retrieval of an archived image but an ongoing process of reconstruction shaped equally by imagination, omission, and forgetting. What might that process look like as a painting?

The segmented structures within these works borrow, almost unintentionally, from the visual language of contemporary technology. Their edges resemble selections, masks, or lassoed regions familiar to digital editing software, yet they remain handmade through drawing, painting, erasure, and revision. These forms acknowledge the increasingly mediated ways we organize visual information while honoring the tactile, imperfect qualities unique to painting. The compositions become records of decisions rather than declarations of certainty.

These paintings are investigations rather than conclusions. They speculate that perception itself may be provisional even Rubensteinian, continually revised as new experiences that reshape old ones. Like memory, the paintings remain open, allowing fragments to coexist without resolution. What remains is not a singular image of a place, but a continually evolving architecture of experience, where remembering, imagining, and seeing are inseparable acts.

Pictured left: “Desert Garden” 48 x 62 x2”