I’m an artist and musician born, raised, and based out of Santa Fe, N.M., best known for my oil paintings of the Southwest, which blend traditional landscape art techniques with contemporary abstraction and psychedelia. I am represented by Sun & Dust Gallery at 616 Canyon Road in Santa Fe.
My visual art is deeply tied to my own experiences and emotional connection to Northern New Mexico and the Desert Southwest. The grandson of a painter, I grew up around the sights and smells of oil paint and it continues to be the predominant medium in my painting practice, though my work in the 2020s has incorporated fluorescent acrylic paint as a backdrop as I have sought to convey the unmistakable vibrance of the desert sky.
My approach to landscape oil painting is rooted in reverence for 19th Century Tonalist and Hudson River School landscape painters, as well as the Impressionistic traditions of painting the American West. Expressionist Tonalism features oils applied thin, an emphasis on the depiction of atmosphere, the abstraction of natural forms, and an aim to portray an arrangement of terrain, light, and nature in a way which conveys the mood and sensation of observing an instant rather than explicit depiction of an area. All of these qualities are front and center in my work.
Craftsmanship, design, and function are fundamental parts of my art practice, and as such each canvas is hand-stretched, and each piece is set in a custom frame crafted and finished by me using hardwood and a handmade Scandinavian soap finish. By being involved with this much of the creation and finishing, I feel that I deepen the relationship between myself and each piece, and in this way the practice grows beyond the brush-to-surface process and becomes an engagement with a designed object from beginning to end, with the end of that journey being the fulfillment of the piece’s function as an element of a space.
My paintings are titled via a simple subject-series-number naming convention, in part because I don’t seek to impart my own meaning into my works. I wish for my paintings to serve as a resonance chamber for the experiences and emotions of the viewer. Landscape painting as the observation of an instant, to me goes as far as the instant the piece itself is observed, as we each bring to that interaction our own experiences and memories of these areas and these moments in time.
As a musician, I have written and produced four independent studio albums in addition to composing and performing the original score for Antonio Marquez’s short film ¡Baca the Kid! (2022).
Profile Article “The Next Chapter”— Feb ’23
Review of Bloom Delicacy — July ’17