“In this Twilight” encloses natural imagery painted in tar and oil in 19th century clock-cases and portrait and mirror frames.
Titled with phrases from the works of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the paintings of "In this Twilight" offer an elegiac and perhaps prophetic reminder of our lost reverence for nature amid acknowledgement of an imperiled future. Visually, the paintings suspend natural imagery in a liminal space suggestive of an “imaginal” world, one in which natural and supernatural intertwine.This series is taking shape with a residency at Harvard University’s Transcendentalism Initiative (CSWR, Harvard Divinity School). In this Twilight avoids offering hope as reassurance, nor despair as performance. The intention is to hold grief without aestheticizing catastrophe.
In this Twilight deliberately calls us to a moment in the nineteenth century when American Transcendentalist philosophers, artists, and writers opened a space for a spiritual, ethical, and personally meaningful relation to nature and ecology. Although, sadly, we let that moment pass, it may yet not be too late to heed what it was telling us.
These paintings are not strictly allegorical nor overtly political, nor are they “doomerist” or without hope. The intention is to reflect truth while occupying an ambiguous position in the space of these tensions.
Nearly all are framed in vintage Victorian moldings that once held clock-faces, portraits, and mirrors sourced from New England attics and flea markets. Luminous natural forms emerge through a dark veil of tar and time like a hymn between worlds where beauty and decay, light, loss, and rebirth share the same breath.
