Artist Statement:

Spirituality is an esoteric topic and some people may not consider it when it comes to the personal subject of fulfillment. However, I’ve personally been using spirituality to explore themes of fulfillment and identity. These themes are expressed through landscape oil paintings that depict the memorable places that I've been to throughout my life. Painting these landscapes almost serves as a uniquely spiritual form of meditation, allowing me to reflect on the experiences and emotions that I associate with these places. Psychologists like Carl Jung have proposed that spirituality and faith in some form are important to the development of people. Jung argued that meditative rituals associated with faith or spirituality are essential to the process he called “Individuation”. By painting these landscapes of places that are familiar to me and vaguely familiar to other people, I hope to similarly invoke memories and feelings associated with these places. These landscape paintings are not made with faithful depictions of nature in mind, but rather they’re intended to reflect on my soul and the sensations that saturate my mind in this retrospection.

The landscape painting The Hermit is named directly after the tarot card. Much like the tarot card, The Hermit represents concepts like contemplation and isolation. This is a deeply personal painting as the composition represents the fragmented desires that linger in my mind. I yearn to find myself in a different reality, in an environment where I don’t feel burdened by the world around me and how it seeks to subjugate me.