These paintings begin with looking — at a place, a light, a memory of being somewhere — and then follow the color where it wants to go. Nature has a way of arriving through the hands when you stop directing it too hard.

The title holds a pun I mean seriously: landscape as land-escape, the natural world as a place we retreat to. But the longer I paint it, the less accurate “escape” feels. We are not visiting nature when we stand in it. We are part of it whether we know it or not, continuous with it in ways we spend most of our lives ignoring. These paintings are less about escape than about recognition — the quiet shock of realizing you are exactly where you have always been.