Domestic Disturbances
The suburban landscape is our contemporary pastoralism, where nature is still present but is controlled, tamed and defanged.  We covet such a landscape as a bulwark against an underlying fear that domestic security and certainty is a small step away from easily unraveling.  The terror, unpredictability and sublime sense of awe associated with wilderness has been banished, so that home life can flourish in safety. 

Yet such a construction is never complete.  Despite our best efforts, there are always signs of the lurking chaos of nature.  Indeed such unpredictability is somewhat attractive, as too much security feels stifling and numbing. These paintings often take place right after such an incursion has occurred: where a transformer has been set on fire, or a tree is blown down by a storm.  The compositions are often off kilter and the horizon lines are seldom straight, echoing this destabilization of the domestic.

But such danger is by no means dominant in these paintings, and these disruptions are small, almost humorous in their insignificance.  I am interested in the ambivalence between which should succeed: while suburbia is claustrophobic in its insistence on order and control, the intrusion of wildness is also unacceptably dangerous to our carefully built backyard worlds.  There is disappointment that the unpredictable is ultimately ineffectual, but also anxiety that it is not.