Director Agnes Varda speaks about beaches as a thread through the events of her life. “It's true that I've been on beaches all my life. I know that if I need the ideal place, it's the perfect one for me. This has nothing to do with swimming or surfing or sailing. It's the pleasure of watching the beach.” If we broke people open, she says, “inside we’d find landscapes.” And in her would be beaches; in me would be mountains and plains crashing into one another.

This landscape series is a series beginning the study of those shapes and lines through acrylic on canvas. They are an effort to express the visual freedom the South Dakota landscape offers as well as freedom I experience in a state of flow.

There is a dimensionality to both a flow state and to physical landscape that is in constant movement.  Breaking the landscape into blocks is an attempt to express that multidimensionality:  the movement, the complexity that is present in both flow and landscape.  Bright colors are important in this expression: they’re a representation of the vividness I sense in flow.  Vastness of neutral - usually white - is important as well: it’s a representation of the quiet, the detachment that happens in both flow and being in and on the land.

The landscapes are varied and organic, yet somewhat structured and organized as well.  They are a reflection of the tension I see both in the landscape around me and the experience of being in a flow state: a directed freedom.