About the Work — Southwest

I came to the Southwest the way most people do: already carrying a version of it. The one assembled from decades of film and advertising and the persistent romance of American landscape — a West that was always more idea than geography, more myth than mud.

Learning the place came first. Not in paintings intended to show, but in the discipline of standing in it and paying attention — the particular quality of light at elevation, the way the Jemez Mountains hold color at dusk, the specific character of silence the high desert offers and the way it changes by season. Plein air as field work. You can't put a figure honestly into a place you haven't looked at until it started making sense.

The figures came next, and they came wearing the wrong clothes.

The cowboys in my Southwest paintings are not the cowboys of the western tradition, though they carry that tradition's weight like a man carries a good coat he's slightly embarrassed to own. They perform rope tricks — some documented, some entirely invented — in costuming that owes more to musical theater than to anything you'd find in a working ranch. The tension between the landscape underneath them, which is painstakingly observed, and the performance happening in front of it, which is painstakingly not, is more or less the point. The West has always been a performance. The paintings just stop pretending otherwise.

The Rope Tricks series is the most sustained expression of this — an ongoing body of work that takes the iconography of western American culture seriously enough to look at it sideways.