Interference

2021
Ink, watercolor, and pencil done on both paper and on panel

I love working with watercolors and inks and the way they interact with each other, but I also love making energetic, sharp, wild marks with pencils, charcoal, and pastel (but especially pencil). This work synthesizes those two ideas: the colors of the landscape blend together between soft and hard edges, peeking through and melting into one another, while the wild energy of the marks in the foreground of the work hint at something that could be trees being wildly bent in the wind, or it could be the wind itself trying to disrupt the harmony of the landscape.

As I’ve been making my way through this work, I’ve been trying to make sense of what it means and where it comes from. It felt deeply personal but it took some time and several iterations before I began to piece together the reason why these were coming out. I began to realize that these are not just imagined geographical landscapes; these were representations of my own mental landscape. There is an attempt at serenity there, but the need to make wild, screaming marks over that serenity — all while holding back and not even making the full spectrum of scrapes, gouges, and jagged marks I have the urge to make for fear of ruining the work — reminded me of voices. They are representations of the chaotic, unpredictable voices that filled my landscapes as a child, and they represent the inner ones that I took on when I subconsciously modeled those voices.

The word “interference” came to mind as I tried to label this body of work. We tend to use this word in everyday meaning in a negative sense, but in the scientific sense interference can be both constructive and destructive. It’s this meaning that felt like the right way to describe this series — a representation of the destructive interference I’ve worked hard to push down and the hope for constructive interference that I’ve sought to lift up, to cancel out the louder destructive noise. The next phase of the work will be to evolve it toward the theme of constructive interference and resolution.

If nothing else, working on this series has opened doors for me to my own subconscious that were inaccessible any other way.

The work has evolved over time to include images with darker, more diffuse skies and a more natural color palette — something more directly reminiscent of what we see here in the Pacific Northwest. The core idea in “Interference” is still present, however — the chaotic marks over distant horizons and big skies. The following images are from this more darker take on the work.