My art practice is interdisciplinary and experimental, but painting has always held a central place and I have been exploring the theme of housing for several years as a painter.

I left art and studied urban studies and economics as well as art history for a few years in my thirties, which project culminated in an MS in urban planning from Columbia University in 2011.

I took some time to raise my son after that, returning to painting as I did so - with perhaps a heightened awareness of our symbiotic relationship to landscape: cultural and political as well as physical. I am still working on the problem of housing in a capitalist democracy as a project in imagining spaces of community and convergence in sequential, chromatically defined landscapes. The dominant experience is much less policy wonk than color-flooded fever dreams.

These are “housing development plans”, with the trope of a simple housing form repeated, serving to secure a grid across each large rectangle and establish the pictorial space of a neighborhood. I choose a dominant color and then allow for an improvisational painting process open to impulse, memory, and imagination. I then enjoy naming them with a nod to the late capitalist practice of churning out mass-produced homes and appealing to an aspirational middle class with nomenclature that suggests royal enclaves or olden times of yore. I pull from my own poetic proclivities and interests: paintings from the most current cycle are named for the chakras (from my yoga practice) as it also pulls from their associated colors. I sometimes play with materiality as well as color and imagery, occasionally using such things as scraps of fabric, aluminum foil, Astroturf or glitter in building out the spaces.

Housing is rich with meaning. In these spaces, all the houses are the same types of simple saltbox shapes my Swedish-German grandfather built 75 years ago as he built up my mother’s childhood neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama. These paintings are not depicting individually spectacular architectural experiments, mansions, or McMansions. However housing production might be critiqued- its’ speculative production methods, the naming of neighborhoods to draw forth consumers- those enclaves collectively become the sites of communities: places where flora and fauna bloom and grow, places of birth and death and children playing, and occasionally dark secrets as well. Places of mystery and magic.

These paintings can also be considered a prayer for housing in a time of global wealth expansion atop growing homelessness, suffering, and instability.