Days of Heaven, opening June 6 at Gallery Poulsen
This body of work reflects my life in Missouri. My dear friend Lissa is the protagonist of
each painting. Having first met in California over fifteen years ago, our lives initially
intersected only superficially. She was my barista and I would sometimes do her the favor of
picking up her daughter from school. They both modeled for me over the following years.
After I left California for New York, I saw Lissa and her daughter only once, when they spent
the night on their way to travel in West Africa.
We each independently moved to Missouri, she in 2019 and I in 2020. Our friendship
has deepened over the past five years. We share a love of vast landscapes and big skies: she
yearns for the sands of the Middle East in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert while I am drawn
to the stark fields of the Texas panhandle in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. In Missouri, the
sky sits close upon the earth, clouds dwarfing the geography so that it lacks angles and any
meaningful landmarks. Perhaps this is what led us both, eventually, from the jagged coastline
of Northern California to the midwest.
Lissa lives on a farm that shares a border to a large expanse of public land. She is
surrounded by the sandstone bluffs, fecund fields, and big skies of the Missouri countryside.
Her inherent love of the natural world has manifested in new capabilities, from foraging edible
plants to hunting rabbits and deer to nurturing hurt or abandoned animals. She heads to the
woods on her own or with her beloved goat, Osmol, almost daily. In this environment, she
enjoys her solitude, her curiosity finding companionship in the fossils, plants, and rocks she
gathers.
Missouri is as violent as it is beautiful. On summer evenings, clouds from Tiepolo’s
heavens sit motionless to the ubiquitous pop-pop of target practice. Kids walk down the street
with rifles on their shoulders as they head to public lands maintained by the highly effective
department of conservation. Missouri’s chaotic personality continues to inspire and shock me.
These five paintings span the length of a day, from dawn to dusk. Lissa’s single figure
roams through degrees of solitude and loneliness, the tone of each painting determined by her
relationship to the surrounding fields. The landscapes are pastoral, not wild. These spaces are
tamed and maintained for profit. Lissa is sometimes left exposed, sometimes confined by crops
and hay bales. Her gesture ranges from self-protective to confrontational to passive. While
each painting celebrates the bountiful beauty of Missouri, it is unclear as to whether this beauty
imprisons or liberates the human it holds.