WARINGARTS

I am a landscape painter based in Flagstaff, Arizona.  My passion is southwestern landscapes.  

I began painting as a child, got to see many of the greatest art museums in the world, and then studied science.  While in college in Arizona, I fell in love with ecological thinking, including its evolutionary underpinnings.  I got to study agaves and creosote bush and all the animals then feed on them.  I got to study pines and willows and ecosystems in Lake Powell and Grand Canyon and rare Mohave Desert plants, and loved them all.  The art of learning to see lies at the heart of science, too.  My work in science has culminated in several books on regional natural history and writing a column on local natural history for my town's paper.  I learned that thinking as a naturalist, kind of a softer, more humanistsic consideration of the natural world was the way for me to go.

I painted my way through my biological studies, sometimes illustrating plants, sometimes painting the places where I worked, because, of course, they were usually remote, pristine, quiet and beautiful.  While exploring this cross of nature and art, I started papermaking.  I would create pieces, weaving plant species that occurred together in a particular habitat.  Plant parts wove in and out of the pulp, creating at once a sense of place, with kind of an abstract appearance.  In the last 20 years I have beomce devoted to painting, devoted to western landscapes.  

The experience of both art and science has so informed my process in art.  I don't understand how these different passions come together or spill over, but they do.  When I was writing my natural history books and painting, the written words often flowed like strokes of paint.

The profound beauty of southwestern landscapes is what really grabbed me.  I lived in Europe, Central America, the eastern United States, and even 10 years in Colorado.  The feel of the Southwest was different.  I knew it when I rolled through the first time--seeing saguaros silhouetted in the moonlight, and then when I came to the Southwest for the first time, passing the Echo Cliffs lighted up at sunrise.

Coming up next is a trip to the Great Basin, to experience open and spare landscapes.  I wrote about this region, so battered by the last ice age, laid bare for all to see. 

Two major influences in southwestern painting are artists Maynard Dixon and Joella Mahoney.