after flood

The heavy rains of 2023 brought death and devastation to many communities in California. This series was an exploration of the damage caused in south Sacramento county. At the time of their painting, I was living in the countryside of Galt, California. The relentless inundation coincided with one of the darkest periods of my personal life and I witnessed firsthand the wreckage of the deluge as I was commuting to Midtown every day.

To do the work I first chose canvases that had been in my studio and that had layers of accumulated paint covering their surface. Just like the rural farmlands and the suburban communities that were deeply impacted by the raging waters of the Cosumnes and Tuolumne rivers, I created new compositions and flooded the canvases with new layers of oil paints that would leave the previous canvases all but erased. However, just as nature and humanity endure, so do some of the underlayers of these paintings.