It was in December of last year that I started the Taft Gardens artist residency. I had been roaming the gardens a few weeks prior, taking photos of various flowers and plants, especially the majestic and spiky aloes, and collecting dead plant matter. Anything that’s fallen to the ground was fair game. I’d bring small bags, put the plant stuff in, write the name of the plant on the bag and draw a picture with my sharpie on it so that I could easily recognize it when I was sifting through the dozens and dozens of photos I was taking. Once back home I burned each pile of the material in a small cast iron cauldron, an action somewhere between burning incense and casting spells. The sage smelled great. Other plants I couldn’t really tell the difference. Most of the time the smell was just that of burned wood.

- By the way, if any of this sounds interesting, my studio will be open for the July 11th, Second Saturday OSA studio tour. See the website for more details. Now back to the post -

Once burned, I’d collect the ash and grind it down to fine powder with a mortar and pestle. When ground all of the ash turns into a type of dark gray or black color. I then put it back in the bags to be used in the paintings later once I built all the panels.

At the core of my work is a transformative process of burning wood panels and applying ash to the surface before painting it with oil paint. I came upon this process almost by accident, but also entirely by necessity, when I no longer knew in which direction my work was taking me. Back in 2016 I was about to graduate with an MFA. A fundamental chapter in my life was about to end. I had moved to California to discover what type of artist I was.

The fires that broke out that summer in the mountains around the Camino Cielo pointed out the direction. It also identified my subject and the materials I was going to use from then on and created a link between them that I continue to explore to this day. The Taft residency allowed me time to return to those early days of exploring a new subject using its ashes as base material. For years I’ve been using a generic ash, collected over time from various sources, most often from my fireplace. At Taft I was going back to the beginning, threading the needle on a whole new series, a new direction maybe.

As I was painting in those dark winter days, I thought about the connections of this work to the gardens and the grander narrative, my silly intellectual brain hoping to capture a moment of clarity in a world that tends toward the opposite. With the paintings I got close I believe. They’re snapshots, close ups of parts of the plants, but never the entire plant as such. This was how I thought of my experience of the residency and the garden, as a microcosm of what is truly happening on the ground. We may see a plant as something alive, but that is because we’re trained only to see that part of it. We identify with it, because we are also alive. But each plant also has its dead parts coexisting with the parts that are alive, and nowhere is this more apparent than on the aloe. From top to bottom, the entire spectrum of life is present.

The garden itself is also both alive and dead, the dead parts on which we walk, the fallen leaves and twigs, are food energy for the parts of the plants that are still growing and for the seeds that have fallen out of the withered pods and flowers. We may call it the circle of life, but I no longer think of it as a circle either, because a circle suggests a direction. Life in this context is more like the holographic universe, existing everywhere all at once, coexisting with its counterpart, which is also everywhere all at once. All I am able to do as an artist is to provide snapshots of that experience and very crudely point others to a new place. Hopefully I’ve succeeded in at least a small part of that endeavor.

Photo credit: Mikael Jorgensen