Wetlands

Wetlands — it is an oxymoron. I had never heard of the term until I had moved to Minnesota. It suggested something primitive, primordial maybe even inhospitable.

I wanted to find a natural subject close to home, unique to this region. A subject that was common and ubiquitous—not the sublime but the mundane. I wondered if I could make paintings of something as every day and familiar as Cedar Lake. 

One spring day I went for a walk there and what I found was not a landscape but a chaotic scene of both decay and growth. I was attracted to this chaos of last year’s collapsed cattails with green shoots emerging. It felt very alive, but I was not sure how to represent it. I took some photographs.

The photographs framed and simplified what I saw as chaos. They helped me to focus on the pattern and the structure of light. Light could be the order by which I could structure these paintings. I grew to love the reduced palette of early spring by the lake: yellow ochre, burnt sienna, white and ultramarine blue. I wanted to follow these plants through their entire yearly cycle. That proved impossible in the time that was available. 

The paintings I have made represent my visit to the edge of primordial chaos, life, which is the wetlands.