Iceland : Basalt

Mixed Media + Poetry
2017








2 Poems - (Jökulsá & Krafla)
6 x 8
Pencil and Ink on Paper


16 Painted Polaroids
3.5” x 4.25”
Mixed Media on Paper
(Watercolor, Ink, Colored Pencil, Pastel)


37 Photo Transfers
(54mm x 86mm - 86mm x 86mm - 108mm x 86mm)
Single Run Print - Varnished Xylene Inkjet Transfer

In 2016 I had the great fortune to be selected as part of the LGAL Iceland Residency program, where I spent a week in the northern reaches of that great country in the excellent company of several friends and artists.




There’s an immediate and visceral awe at the grandeur of the Icelandic landscape that is absolutely inescapable; the geography so vast and and differentiated. There’s the well known and expected (but no less wondrous) barren alienness of the place, and yet I also found myself reveling in the unexpected; nose to the ground everywhere I went, engrossed in vivid growing green and the myriad details of infinite inexhaustible life literally everywhere underfoot.

In several moments I found myself witness to absolute glory; utterly captivated by some numinous presence, profoundly moved by something beyond human comprehension… Though there’s a banality too; the monotony of the endless driving, and the trappings of tourism, the sense that the real Iceland is just off road at the edge of the horizon...

It is my intention with this spread, to capture and present a sense of the many overwhelming impressions, textures, moods, that add up to a remembered feeling of my time there. Through the juxtaposition of poetry, painting, and transfer photography, it is my intention to evoke a heightened, feeling appreciation of the every-day in an exceptional place…

Inviting you, the viewer, into the same frame of mind I found myself, wondering:

“Is this place real?! ”



Exhibited at Light Grey Art Lab’s “Wanderlust”