Oil on Canvas

48″ x 60″

“The ground began to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big fat bloches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand a cubist painting.” -Ernest Hemingway

I have always been attracted to infinite, silent spaces, and the interaction of natural and man-made landscapes. Flying over the land of my ancestry, I realized the sheer immensity and physical splendor of THE LAND as well as the natural geographic patterns it makes. From the air, the world’s geometries and spaces are revealed, appearing as a huge patchwork of geometric regulation: a grid of squares highlighted by clusters of settlement, farming patterns, circular irrigation fields, and transversing lines of infrastructure. Meandering rivers, hills, mountains, forests, and desert break the geometrical framework, sometimes arbitrarily and sometimes intentionally.

In this piece, I am also interested in using the grid as a template. From a visual point of view the grid is interesting both for its relentless monotony and its disintegration along the edges. Above all else the grid is an incredible registration that defines the American landscape. It is an expression of one of the founding democratic principles that land is to be equally distributed, shared, and divided.