Artist Project: Spring 2021

My work begins with an appropriative gesture.

It may seem at first like a far-reaching idea to marry the improvisational and biomorphic wood forms of Pittsburgh, PA sculptor Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926 in New Castle, PA) with the 19th-century Hudson River School landscapes of Thomas Cole (1801–1848 in England). Yet it made complete sense to me almost instantly. Mosley and Cole are both naturalists and romantics—of a sort.

In interviews about his life and work, Thaddeus Mosley refers to spending much of his childhood walking in the woods, climbing trees, and watching his father forage for wild mushrooms. He developed a love for trees and the intrinsic beauty of wood. With nothing but a chisel and mallet, Mosley transforms felled trees, wood from local sawmills, and reclaimed building materials into monumental sculptures that reference the musical structure of jazz and expand an understanding of American abstraction. With paint and brush, Cole described the natural splendor of 19th-century America through the dark lenses of manifest destiny and industrialization. Unlike Mosley, Cole was not born in Pennsylvania, but after his family immigrated to America, he spent brief periods living and working in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He would ultimately find his spiritual and physical home in upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with a different way of life. Forced inside, I find myself intrigued more than ever by landscapes—real and imagined, near and far. Ideas related to beauty, empathy, ownership, and improvisation have loomed large in my thoughts. In this series of drawings, I combined my usual lineup of materials, tools, and transformative processes—making marks by burning and branding, and use of gold leaf—to build surfaces that mimic naturalistic elements and environmental conditions.

In these spaces, I find endless possibility and an alternative to our current state.