American Primitive

Named for the broad category of pre-World War II American folk music, the American Primitive series of landscapes includes works on paper and oil paintings on canvas.

I use Upper Midwestern landscapes as a vehicle to document cultural memory and metaphor, and the physical changes surrounding that memory. Through deliberate gestural abstraction, these paintings drift toward recognizable images that act as glimpses or reminders of overlooked forces shaping our present. These forces could be cultural events like war, exodus, or cycles of claim and possession; or they could be environmental events such as flood and drought, erosion, or seasonal changes.

Ideally, the tension between a claimed landscape image and the abstraction or complication of that image draws the viewer into a moment of consideration. The viewer must reconcile what he or she sees with what is being suggested. Hopefully, that moment allows the mood of the painting to encourage reflection on the forces that have formed, and continue to influence, our common culture and environment.