There comes a point when a landscape can no longer be seen innocently. Ecological knowledge is a threshold: once crossed, it changes our perception of familiar places. A roadside becomes habitat, an isolated tree becomes evidence of fragmentation, and a patch of spontaneous vegetation becomes both an expression of resilience and a record of disturbance. My oil paintings examine these thresholds in Greater Houston's evolving landscape, where beauty persists alongside what has been altered, displaced, or lost.
These paintings operate as love letters, records of ephemeral landscapes, and warnings of human environmental impacts. Based on close observation of edgelands and urban landscapes at an intimate scale, my work depicts overlooked microhabitats, including bayou tributaries, roadsides, and vacant lots. I seek margins where plants volunteer, take hold, and grow large enough to move with the wind. These fragmented spaces are home to living systems, sustaining insects, birds, and unseen networks of exchange. Rooted in real locations, my paintings attend to places where wildness persists despite pressure, improvising within constraint.
I am drawn to these interstitial spaces for their tension: beauty braided with precarity, resilience shadowed by loss. They are sites of disturbance, but also of adaptation, landscapes in flux that mirror a broader ecological uncertainty. Awareness of what has been altered or lost also reveals what persists: the unexpected places where other species adapt, reclaim space, and continue to live alongside us. To paint them is to witness both their vulnerability and their insistence on life.
I ground my work in sustained, place-based engagement. Moving through the city as both artist and naturalist, I allow other species to guide my sense of what is significant from a more-than-human perspective. In doing so, I aim to unsettle the assumption that nature exists elsewhere. The boundary between the urban and the wild is permeable, if not entirely imagined.