"The Great Lakes taught me that scale is an emotion, not just a measurement, and that the landscape is constantly in motion, pushing and pulling the earth, always transforming in front of our eyes. 

When I recently worked on “Empire, Icebound,” I wasn’t trying to precisely document what that shoreline looks like. I was trying to create what it's like to stand at the edge of it, the way ice can make a lake feel both dangerous and completely still at once, alive and dormant in the same moment.

Color does most of that work for me. I lean into invented, non-naturalistic atmosphere. The emotional temperature of a place over literal light. Form does the rest. How I simplify or distort the dune, the ice, the horizon line, is as much a response to what I felt there as the color palette.

In that sense the Great Lakes function less as scenery and more as a recurring emotional register in my work. It’s a place I return to because it keeps giving me new versions of the same feeling: smallness in front of something that’s vast, restless, and indifferent."