Artist's Statement from Southern Gothic Now at Space 301 in Mobile, AL

Though I'm more Buddhist than anything else, the Cloudmapping paintings’ narratives are steeped in the same supernatural Old Testament world that fueled the great-greats of Southern literature.  A Serpent; an Ark; an ultimatum hovering in the sky – these are denizens and mechanisms of the stories that haunt Faulkner’s characters, or McCullers’.  The world around us is material and tangible, but it is also permeable to revelation and catastrophe.  Time is experienced in days, but it is also measured on the line stemming from Creation and ending in Judgment.  In the paintings’ maximalist, intergrowing lushness I see the influences of pond, marsh, coast, and viney woods: Southern places.  I also see the Garden, and perhaps the world before it came to be.