Hoping we can remember that as a country we are all in this together as an America transcending borders and party lines…

I had a dream that I would paint a painting of an America without borders without a map, and waking up, realized that Jasper Johns had a similar dream in which he went about painting a map of America that, like his flag, wasn’t a picture of a map, but was kind of its own map.

After Johns and after Richter, I think the job of the artist working from photos and appropriated imagery is to be able to penetrate the image once again, to make an illusory image that could contain emotion and feeling as much as it could relate to things outside of itself, and in a way, I could create this work that would be a Landscape Painting that would be contemporary, just from the technology in which it was derived.

Trying to search for an appropriate image (in my dream instead of borders it was more like a puzzle?) I found that Google Earth really served best and chose a time and a day that was symbolic, and printed the image as high res as possible, to get every nook and cranny recorded by the pastiche satellite imagery.

During this time, tragically my 14-year-old German Shepherd Julian died, and while I was painting this hopeful optimistic image, I was also mourning the loss of my dear and beloved dog. The only thing that kept me from crying was to play Mozart’s Magic Flute over and over, which somehow gave me hope, through its own narrative power about music changing attitudes and lives, as I hoped the painting would do formally through the push and pull of the plastic space.

I love how this painting has surreal elements to its intricacies, and Lake Michigan became a sort of doppelganger for the leg and paw of my Julian, whose spirit I hoped to reach through my meditation and love for my country.