My love affair with Ireland was minted in poetry. For as long as I can remember, the works of John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and W.B. Yeats have held a secret place in my imagination, and, after winning a Fulbright Scholarship in 1997, I chose to live and paint in Dublin for a year. In addition to Fulbright funds, the Irish Museum of Modern Art granted me a spacious, skylit studio in what was the seventeenth-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham. I kept an apartment in the Rathmines section of Dublin but slept on a cot in that studio most nights. Once a week, I put a drawing pad and toothbrush in my backpack and boarded the next train at Heuston Station with a one-way ticket. My intention was simple; as soon as a place looked interesting, I got off and walked.
Ireland is a country best seen on foot, and it rewards those who are willing to smell and touch every detail on wayward lanes braided with damp hedges beneath downy skies. Walking in Ireland taught me how to break down the landscape into composite parts and relate those parts to the human body. For instance, the foreground is visceral and immediate, my sneakers on wet grass. Middle ground is farther away; I could easily walk there but first must visualize being there in my mind. Background is too far away to walk, so I can only project myself there in my imagination. Three layers of spatial information are compressed into a single view. The greater the distance, the more it is internalized, because I have to imagine being there while standing here.
A landscape painting should relate to the body parts of the solitary viewer, with the bottom corresponding to the feet, a midsection, and a top that refers to the space around the head. My paintings arise in the same way we experience the actual landscape, through a collision of personal experience and empirical observation. Art happens when the intellectual and the visceral collide so violently that they fuse into a third thing. Ireland impressed upon me that there is no room for the landscape in a landscape painting; it must be ripped out to make space for the third thing. Only the viewer can turn it back into nature. A landscape painting is complete when the landscape vanishes.