I’m a landscape painter. I say that as both a confession and as an assertion of my newly formed conceptual underpinning.

It has taken me several years to come to terms with two facts. Number one I am from the west, in particular the intermountain west, or really the Great Basin. I am not from, nor do I live in, New York, L.A., Berlin, Paris, or London. I live in the desert mountains of Utah on the shores of a trapped and dying sea, bounded by dry, austere, openness or nothingness depending on your perspective.

The second thing I had to come to terms with - I am a painter. An anachronism in a time of digital photography, satellites & the 1970’s. Being raised in the West I was given the privileges, experience, and baggage that comes from the western ethos. Themes of conquest, brutality, reinvention, self-determination, triumph, and redemption interleave the western myth. Yet, despite my self-determination it has become harder and harder to reinvent myself. The mythology of the West is failing me.

Yet underlying the west literally and figuratively is a narrative of land. My conscious wanderings have always led to me to desire other lands and spaces far from my home. Recently the way back has been by way of the landscape. It has been an irresistible pull towards the land. An investigation into the disconnected patterns and layers of people on the land - viewed as an expression of time. A history of humanity laid out. It is the vastness of the space - constantly interrupted by our hand. Layer over layer – a palimpsest. Use and reuse – cultivation and fallowing.

My most recent work is an attempt to quantify and categorize land through the traditional method of painting the landscape as it is found in digital satellite photography and modern cartography. The PLSS or public land survey system imposed a conceptual cadastral grid across the vast majority of the United States. The grid dissected the land arbitrarily into townships, which are approximately 6 miles square and contain 36 sections, each approximately one mile square. The sections are further divided into aliquot parts as determined by federal regulations and local conditions.

The survey grid is of course a construct and is not visible. Yet because of the length of time of its existence and the rigidness of its makeup the land has slowly shaped itself to the grid. Fences often lay along the dividing lines or parallel to them. Roads sometimes cross through and sometimes conform to the geometry of the grid. Livestock graze in one quarter section and are fenced of from another. Unnatural plant mixes occur where the livestock graze and thus the flora is shaped by the grid. Center-pivot irrigation takes place in roughly quarter-section (quarter mile) areas creating marks like periods punctuating the expanse. All of this is contained in an invisible conceptual framework.

This grid is wholly rational in its conception but arbitrary in its application. It defines and contains the natural disorder but with very little regard to the land over which it is laid. Land becomes a tabula rasa to be shaped and realized by the people who can contain it. That is reinvention.

My work is exploring the artifacts of that reinvention.