Hudson River Skool

is a series of encaustic paintings that use essential fish imagery to explore the materiality of the paint itself, and its almost mystical ability to create deep, translucent space on wood panel.  By repeatedly painting and scraping, history is created and plumbed.  Taken as a whole, these works form a “Hudson River Skool” of fish that speak to the river’s history as a sited cradle of the American environmental movement. A lifelong fascination by water and sunlight glints in this work, as well as the lifelong and constant visual search for what lies beneath the water.  Personal health issues involving my eyes contribute to a longstanding interest in entoptic imagery (what can be seen behind closed eyes) and this resonates with the patterns and surface strategies in these paintings.   

A trip to Newfoundland in 2023 with a goal to see icebergs put me in a weeks long conversation about fishing, overfishing, hoped for whale sightings while missing them repeatedly, the politics of fishing, the diesel smells of the boats, the quest to find a piece of iceberg that had broken off, five ferry crossings, walks on bouldery beaches where we were deafened by the tidal stone crash. Traveling along these distant ocean waters made me think and connect more deeply my own local Hudson River waters.  When we got home, I began to paint these fish.