Q: Your show is called, ‘The Walks I Take Turn to Paper.’  Can you describe the process by which your interaction with the natural world provides inspiration when you are in the studio?

GE:  Experience of place and authenticity of experience are important elements that inform the process of my work. I am interested in developing a scenario where the viewing of the work mimics the discovery and experience one has while walking though a landscape. These works do this by not allowing the viewer to own the totality of the image from one vantage point. They invite and reward exploration.

Q: How and in what medium did you begin working?  How has your work evolved up to this point?

GE:  I started painting in high school using oil on canvas. I became allergic to the paint and the clean up always bothered me, so I started using acrylics. Because they are inexpensive and non-toxic, I could treat the process of painting much looser.  I also liked the way acrylics would absorb into paper and one could draw on top of the painting and use other materials such as typeset, thread and litho tape.  I was raised to think of |Drawing| |Painting| |Sculpture| - all in little boxes… That mindset is constrictive and does not reflect how I naturally experience… or become inspired. Currently, I try to use whatever material or process best expresses what I am trying to convey.

Q: How do you see your work in relation to 19^th century notions of landscape painting where the painting was intended to spark a renewed interest in the viewer with the actual thing it was depicting?

GE:  I don’t feel that the root of my work is nature. Nature is the bird on the surface of the ocean. If one looks at the structure of the work, and approaches it asking questions such as, “If I am to live in this work, what is my world like?” or “What does it mean to have representation and perspective presented like this?”  Landscape is inspiring but it is not what my work is about. I don’t consider myself a landscape painter; because in my mind I know that I am simply using the landscape to reach something more complicated.

Q: Are the landscapes in your work real, remembered or invented?

GE:  There are elements of actual locations (grass from a certain field, pine needles from a certain forest). These are authentic objects that do not “represent” anything because they are the things. The drawings are not usually of particular spaces. They originate from a collective memory of landscape – a compression of all landscapes I have experienced. I think of it like this… If one thinks of the word lake, they may have a concept of lakes that is based on what they have seen in books, heard from other people, or experienced themselves.  The word lake stands for all those things at once. If asked to draw that totality, one might pull from multiple sources depending on what they remember at that moment. This is what I am doing with landscapes.

When I start drawing a landscape I do not know what it’s going to look like. I often start with a chaotic gesture and work from there using if/then questions to build up the surface. Such as … if there is water here, there will be marsh there – if there are trees here, there will be birds flying and nesting there. This process keeps me mindful of the systems in those spaces and is rewarding for me as I make the work.