This painting started out as a story about us. It ended up being a story about where we live.
I've been thinking lately about how long everything took. The volcanic events, the pressure, the chemistry, the slow accumulation of one layer onto the next. The survival. The adaptation. All of it had to happen, in that order, for us to be here now… and we've only just arrived. We are a blip at the very end of a very long story.
Ask anyone how the world was made and they'll tell you from where they're standing. Their vantage point, their narrative, what they've been told. I wanted to see it from every angle at once, the way God sees it. The way the rocks see it. So each panel sits at a different scale: a landscape at eye level, the way a person or an animal would meet it. A desert river from above, the way a bird crosses it. A butterfly's wing so close it stops being a wing. A flower, held still long enough to be the sole focus. Same earth. Four witnesses.
The canvases are stepped and layered, the way strata are, each one set at its own depth.
The stones are desert jasper, found in Madagascar and mined by hand. It takes millions of years to form: volcanic ash and mineral chemistry pressed into those sunset-colored layers. I keep returning to rocks because they're the only witnesses I can actually hold. They were here long before I was. They were there for the parts I'm asking about.
This is a painting about the earth, and about what we're made of. The dust.
This painting started out as a story about us. It ended up being a story about where we live.
I've been thinking lately about how long everything took. The volcanic events, the pressure, the chemistry, the slow accumulation of one layer onto the next. The survival. The adaptation. All of it had to happen, in that order, for us to be here now… and we've only just arrived. We are a blip at the very end of a very long story.
Ask anyone how the world was made and they'll tell you from where they're standing. Their vantage point, their narrative, what they've been told. I wanted to see it from every angle at once, the way God sees it. The way the rocks see it. So each panel sits at a different scale: a landscape at eye level, the way a person or an animal would meet it. A desert river from above, the way a bird crosses it. A butterfly's wing so close it stops being a wing. A flower, held still long enough to be the sole focus. Same earth. Four witnesses.
The canvases are stepped and layered, the way strata are, each one set at its own depth.
The stones are desert jasper, found in Madagascar and mined by hand. It takes millions of years to form: volcanic ash and mineral chemistry pressed into those sunset-colored layers. I keep returning to rocks because they're the only witnesses I can actually hold. They were here long before I was. They were there for the parts I'm asking about.
This is a painting about the earth, and about what we're made of. The dust.
