And With the Two Halves of My Soul I Look at the World, 2025, 24 x 30 x 1.5 inches unframed or 25.25 x 31.25 x 2 inches framed, acrylic, canvas, flashe, LDPE, oil pastel on canvas 

$830 unframed or
$980 framed
paintings are framed to order so kindly allow additional time for framing

The Story Behind the Work

So many of my memories come from photographs. This piece considers the role of photography in nature travel. With tracing paper, I drew directly on a photograph Mari took during one of our hikes in Patagonia to use as the sketch for this painting.

And With the Two Halves of My Soul I Look at the World, named after a Pablo Neruda poem, features textures built up from a layer of monoprinting with plastic bags (LDPE), underneath layers of rich, earthy browns, and ultimately topped with textural rubbings from oil pastels.

"Every print is a result of contact and release, which links it immediately to themes of touch, presence, and intimacy but also loss, separation, and memory."
– Jennifer L. Roberts, art historian, Harvard

We live in a time of overwhelming speed — digital immediacy, rapid production, and a barrage of news updates. Nature, in contrast, moves at its own pace. Glaciers form over centuries, forests regenerate over decades, and landscapes shift in ways that are imperceptible to us yet are made apparent over time. I feel the contrast in timescales between people and nature as I worked on this series in New York surrounded by skyscrapers, new shops popping up on my street, and social media updates while thinking about the inspiration for this series, the slow descent to the Torres del Paine granite peaks of Patagonia and the glaciers that formed them over millennia.

As Jennifer L. Roberts says in her six-part National Gallery of Art lecture series, printmaking is an intimate act of creation in which two foreign bodies rub up against each other with part of one of those bodies physically rubbing off onto the other.

I see this, the contact and release, the rubbing up and rubbing off, as a beautiful metaphor for our relationships, including our relationship with the natural environment. This is why I encorporate monoprinting in my paintings. We shape the environment through our fear and an urge to contain, control, ignore, damage, admire, revere, abuse, and preserve it, and it shapes us via the fragments of it we take with us in the forms of materials, photographs, sustenance, memories, ideologies, and beliefs.