“Constructing a still life allows me to force together images that may not belong together, gives me the intense information that comes through painting from life and creates a place to explore metaphors that emerge from the collision of objects and images. Everything is open, ways of using paint, constructing an image, cues about space. I like that this very traditional form opens the investigation and that focus on specific objects can wipe out the line between the concrete and the imagined.

In the mapping series, a USGS map of Johnson and the Green Mountains makes the base of the still life and connects the map to the real place. Stiff ornaments on top of the map, made on the other side of the globe and shipped back to the US for Christmas decoration, stand in for the deer hunted in the surrounding woods and mountains. In making these paintings, I can explore a sense of place in the mountains and town surrounding the studio and the link between hunting, maps, animals and art. Painting altitude lines as they curved around the shades of green and brown made me think of the physical mountains moving around the studio building and the road outside. The distance between Johnson hunting camps and the drawing of palaeolithic shaman and hunters is profound and at the same time collapses. The concrete subject matter and the painting itself link to the materiality of historical works, made from earth pigments on rock cave walls. In between is room for all the questions about meaning and purpose of the paintings and connections to place and the very real things in it.”

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