bathos
2021

I began work on bathos—the first series of paintings I’d attempted in years—in the summer of 2019, during an isolated and uncertain time in my life. I’d taken up running again and would spend hours each morning exploring the landscape on foot, returning home to paint from my photos and memories of it each night in practice. 

 

bathos was intended to commemorate this period of personal and artistic practice; to celebrate the quiet morning landscapes I escaped into, and to shed the uncertainty that led me to them. 

 

The literary term bathos refers to an unintentional anticlimax wherein the author’s lofty narrative aims are missed, resulting in the trivial or absurd. This was the title I chose as I set out to represent weighty personal struggles writ universal as…the color pink. In the narrative arc of the series, an impossible pink form subsumes more and more of the frame, painting-to-painting as the series progresses, until all that remains is an unsettling pink. That was it. Not all of it, but that was pretty much the whole thing. 

 

That was, until the world paused to the pandemic. Suddenly everyone else was isolated, too, every landscape empty at all hours of the day, a universal weight blanketing everything at once. 

 

Everything pink. 

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