Tangled Bank 12.10 | Ink, acrylic, Collage on Paper | 14" x 16" | 2016

Tangled Bank 12.19 | Acrylic, Collage on Paper | 14" x 16" | 2016

Artist Statement: My work is a synthesis of many different influences, most notably the concept of a “Tangled Bank”, which Charles Darwin introduced in his revolutionary “On The Origin of Species” in 1859.

Darwin writes “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...”

I seek to reconcile how these laws apply to art—to see how the application of marks, materials, color, line and other aspects of composition and execution can be an extension of Darwin’s concepts. Adaptation, inheritance, and variation all inform my investigative approach to the work. Over time, the paintings reveal their own tree of life, their own point of origin, and seemingly infinite variations based on seminal (but traceable) characteristics.