With this relatively new body of work I am folding back into a previous set of imaginary landscapes from my allegorical period, but now they are based on my own travel photography. I use the photos as reference for lines and basic shapes, and then play with abstraction and memory. While in the process of painting these landscapes, I am able to be somewhere else, to travel again, to revisit the places I’ve been. And because they are studies, they allow me to try all kinds of new approaches to handling paint, and the results can be clearly seen in the backgrounds of my most recent stuffed animal portraits. I suspect these small landscapes are only the very beginnings of what will become a much larger body of work over the next few years.