University of North Texas 
An abstract painting will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It is alive if you
are.” - Ad Reinhardt
My philosophical approach to painting, specifically the painting of natural forms such as landscapes or
human bodies, is very similar to the philosophy of Chinese landscape painting. Following the approach of
“merging one's consciousness with the landscape,” this form of painting takes a more expressive, rather
than representational approach, in order for artists to convey their own emotions through the landscape.
This has been the way I have always approached representing nature, and the way I feel connected to it.
When I first discovered Chinese landscape painting, it put words to this connection I had always been
trying to represent.
The physical world will bring to you what you bring to it, and each person sees these things differently as
we transmit our own feelings through what we see. I create abstracted senses of landscapes in order to
represent the reciprocal interaction between humans and the natural world; and the way we each change
each other. I believe that our internal state absorbs what we are experiencing physically, especially when
it comes to nature. These warped re-representations of nature rely on what we know as fact: our physical
reality, to relay the flexibility of our perception. I create an individual narrative out of landscape.
I take this a step further in merging figures with the landscape, or representing abstracted figures as
landscape: our physical world an appendage of ourselves. I create and depict landscape as what's
happening internally to the body, and use this depiction to transmit the emotional essence of physicality.