Artist Statement

My paintings come from edge places: memories of Michigan wetlands, suburban margins, dead hedges, damaged trees, and the built-up surfaces of Berlin parks and surrounding forests. I am drawn to sites where growth and waste press against each other. Fallen trees often enter the work as beings in their own right. They appear as bodies, shelters, ruins, and signs of a world still changing. Skeletal figures move through these spaces as allegorical versions of the self: exposed, fragile, and caught inside forces larger than the body.

I grew up near wetlands in a religious atmosphere shaped by catastrophe and unseen conflict. That history left me with a sense that the natural world is never neutral. It can feel charged, threatened, watched, or waiting. In the paintings, this pressure appears through damaged surfaces and unstable images. Decay is present, but it is not final. The work stays with the uneasy overlap between decay and growth, endurance and despair.

My early training in printmaking still affects how I build a painting. I work through pressure, layering, abrasion, and reversal. Drawings and collected images are a starting point, but the painting develops through resistance from the materials and mark making. I add layers of paint, sand, sawdust, straw, and torn fabric, then scrape or sand the surface back down, often with power tools.

The paintings first appear as abstract forms or and mattered surfaces: matte against gloss, dirty color against sudden light, transparent passages over dense areas of pigment. Slowly, recognizable forms begin to surface. Trees, bodies, energetic narratives, thresholds, and fragments of place appear, then become uncertain again.

– Michael Markwick