Above: Surprise, Surprise No. 3 carries the feeling of moving through a landscape shaped by water, weather, and memory. The dark linear drawing creates a pathway through the image, suggesting a trail through snow, wet earth, grasses, and trees, with the landscape opening toward water or distant space. The composition feels both intimate and expansive—a place experienced from within while also extending toward something much larger.
The black marks recall encounters with natural environments throughout my life: the forests, lakes, coastlines, and wilderness landscapes of Michigan, where water often became the organizing force of the landscape. The work holds the sensation of standing near deep water, looking outward and downward at a surface that seems endless.
Below: The reverse reveals another state of the image. Fluorescent green, trapped beneath layers of transparent white paint, remains hidden within the surface while becoming intensely alive under ultraviolet light. The color behaves almost like a submerged light source—present but concealed, similar to something seen beneath the surface of water or beneath layers of ice.
The translucent tracing paper and white-painted passages create a shifting relationship between natural and artificial materials. At moments, the surface recalls the translucency of a plastic shopping bag; at others, it becomes something closer to a photographic negative, where familiar forms are inverted and transformed. The hidden fluorescent layer creates a world that exists simultaneously beneath and within the visible image.
Reflection: The works in Surprise, Surprise often begin with the question of what remains after an experience has passed: what fragments of an image, place, or sensation survive in memory. Surprise, Surprise No. 3 draws from years of encounters with water—from Michigan lakes and coastlines to wilderness landscapes where geological time is visible in every stone, shoreline, and current.
The work moves between cold and warm, surface and depth, memory and perception. It can suggest a path through winter ground, a view from a boat into deep water, grasses moving at the edge of a shore, or a landscape transformed by looking at it from another side. Like memory itself, the image is not fixed; it changes depending on where we stand.
Above: Surprise, Surprise No. 3 carries the feeling of moving through a landscape shaped by water, weather, and memory. The dark linear drawing creates a pathway through the image, suggesting a trail through snow, wet earth, grasses, and trees, with the landscape opening toward water or distant space. The composition feels both intimate and expansive—a place experienced from within while also extending toward something much larger.
The black marks recall encounters with natural environments throughout my life: the forests, lakes, coastlines, and wilderness landscapes of Michigan, where water often became the organizing force of the landscape. The work holds the sensation of standing near deep water, looking outward and downward at a surface that seems endless.
Below: The reverse reveals another state of the image. Fluorescent green, trapped beneath layers of transparent white paint, remains hidden within the surface while becoming intensely alive under ultraviolet light. The color behaves almost like a submerged light source—present but concealed, similar to something seen beneath the surface of water or beneath layers of ice.
The translucent tracing paper and white-painted passages create a shifting relationship between natural and artificial materials. At moments, the surface recalls the translucency of a plastic shopping bag; at others, it becomes something closer to a photographic negative, where familiar forms are inverted and transformed. The hidden fluorescent layer creates a world that exists simultaneously beneath and within the visible image.
Reflection: The works in Surprise, Surprise often begin with the question of what remains after an experience has passed: what fragments of an image, place, or sensation survive in memory. Surprise, Surprise No. 3 draws from years of encounters with water—from Michigan lakes and coastlines to wilderness landscapes where geological time is visible in every stone, shoreline, and current.
The work moves between cold and warm, surface and depth, memory and perception. It can suggest a path through winter ground, a view from a boat into deep water, grasses moving at the edge of a shore, or a landscape transformed by looking at it from another side. Like memory itself, the image is not fixed; it changes depending on where we stand.