My work reflects a nature that is voluptuous and beautiful, but also confrontational and sinister. Predators are camouflaged or at rest, their lonely idyll an invitation aslant. The worlds I create within my paintings highlight the peril of the wilds, the claustrophobia of unattended growth, but they also urge one to tumble in, to throw off caution and niceties and give in to the excesses of life without constraints. A tiger bathes in a pool or emerges from a dense canopy with the offer of a languid freedom only found in the solitude of the terra incognita.

Life on the Gulf Coast is fraught with consequence. We have hurricanes, tornadoes, mold multiplying underneath floorboards and vines pushing through walls, foundations sink and sidewalks buckle. The land here is aggressively active in trying to keep humans at bay. What we have created is not natural or sustainable. If we stopped hacking back the overgrowth and shoring up our homes, this place would fall back into the gulf--which feels like on a small scale what is happening on the planet as a whole.

My work reflects this. The landscape is a protagonist, its obscene lushness often choking out the creatures that inhabit it or a surprise force sweeping through that must be reckoned with. There is beauty to be found in the madness but that distraction could lead to one being swallowed up.

I am interested in chance. I search within drips and splashes of paint, acidic fields and washes of color, to find the lush jungles, pools, and creatures that inhabit my paintings. I think this impulse feels true to life. One can lay all sorts of plans but a random drawing of the stars dumps this surprise circumstance in your lap, and it is up to you to sort it out and create something from the interruption, follow the breadcrumbs out of catastrophe.

Civilizations and empires are lost, choked by their own desires and schemes, but nature reimagines itself and carries on, twisting its tentacles around what once was to create what will be.