Somewhere Along the Way

I have always loved Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and its invitation to wander into the unknown. Somewhere Along the Way, a series of mixed media paintings built around photographs taken on long drives, is an homage to that idea.

Along the seemingly lonely stretches of the West, where it's just you, the tumbleweeds, and the wild horses, time is measured in degrees of decay. Sagging barns rise from the farmland, announcing that they have stood for generations. Gas stations and cafés sit boarded up and covered in graffiti. Driving these roads, I feel a pull of nostalgia for slower times.

At the heart of each painting is a photograph taken from a moving car, a moment of stillness pulled from motion. I move between bursts of intuitive painting and slow, methodical layers of mark-making, found paper, and photo transfer until everything merges and the layers beneath show through. I can control color and composition, but never whether the materials will take to one another or whether the whole will cohere. Chance shapes the work at both ends: in what the road offers and in how the layers meet.

My "Paperweight" series explored parts of the past we hold onto. "Somewhere Along the Way" turns to what we pass by, and what stays with us even as we let it go. Like the view from the road, these pieces are not quite what they seem, familiar and otherworldly at once. Fleeting glimpses of roads seldom traveled.