Artist Statement
Beef State of Mind is a series of nine paintings that combine humor, surrealism, and autobiography to reflect on my move from Montana to Nebraska. The works function like dream diaries, where animals, landscapes, and unlikely encounters stand in for the disorientation and adaptation of shifting geographies.
The title work, Beef State of Mind, frames Nebraska not only as a physical place but also as a psychological condition—an environment shaped by cattle, cranes, prairies, and cultural mythologies. Other canvases introduce motifs that blur sincerity with satire: bison drifting through Prairie Fever Dream, a horse slipping into abstraction, and flowers blooming as both fragile and defiant emblems of resilience.
Threaded throughout the series is a gorilla, a figure borrowed from my own encounter with Daniel Richter’s The Morning After, which I stumbled across in a Nebraska museum. His image lodged itself in my imagination and began reappearing in my work as a kind of surreal guide through unfamiliar terrain. The gorilla emerges most fully in the ninth painting: towering behind buildings on an abstracted city street, it cradles a wounded swan while three human figures move below. Both tender and menacing, this scene amplifies the series’ themes of estrangement, humor, and adaptation.
By weaving together regional iconography, chance artistic encounters, and playful surrealism, Beef State of Mind charts a hybrid landscape that is part personal record, part cultural caricature—a map of transition, where autobiography and imagination converge.
Beef State of Mind is a series of nine paintings that combine humor, surrealism, and autobiography to reflect on my move from Montana to Nebraska. The works function like dream diaries, where animals, landscapes, and unlikely encounters stand in for the disorientation and adaptation of shifting geographies.
The title work, Beef State of Mind, frames Nebraska not only as a physical place but also as a psychological condition—an environment shaped by cattle, cranes, prairies, and cultural mythologies. Other canvases introduce motifs that blur sincerity with satire: bison drifting through Prairie Fever Dream, a horse slipping into abstraction, and flowers blooming as both fragile and defiant emblems of resilience.
Threaded throughout the series is a gorilla, a figure borrowed from my own encounter with Daniel Richter’s The Morning After, which I stumbled across in a Nebraska museum. His image lodged itself in my imagination and began reappearing in my work as a kind of surreal guide through unfamiliar terrain. The gorilla emerges most fully in the ninth painting: towering behind buildings on an abstracted city street, it cradles a wounded swan while three human figures move below. Both tender and menacing, this scene amplifies the series’ themes of estrangement, humor, and adaptation.
By weaving together regional iconography, chance artistic encounters, and playful surrealism, Beef State of Mind charts a hybrid landscape that is part personal record, part cultural caricature—a map of transition, where autobiography and imagination converge.
