“The landscape conveys an impression of absolute permanence. It is not hostile. It is simply there....It is very lonely, yet the absence of all human traces gives you the feeling you understand this land and can take your place in it.”
-- Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo Realities

Being alone in nature has always sustained me. In my twenties, I lived for 5 years in a house in the Maine woods with wood heat and no electricity or running water or money; that close to nature, I felt I had more resources than at any other time. Although I live with more amenities now, I still seek out solitary experiences of nature. What is it about a particular landscape that lets me take my place in it? My drawings are attempts to answer that question, to make visible what helps create my heart’s own home.

But this work is not meant to be self-reflexive only, and I don’t intend to impose my experience on others. Whether my inspiration is the glory of New Mexico skies or the austerity of the Maine coast, I want to make spaces that invite people in, that ask them to take their own place in the surroundings of the drawing. Then, perhaps, they will sense the restorative connection that can and must still exist between us and the natural environment.