The California Burning Series emerges from a return to a landscape that had once shaped both my life and my sense of self. In 2018, I travelled alone through California, revisiting places I had lived in for over a decade. This return was prompted not by nostalgia, but by the aftermath of the 2017 wildfires. News of the Thomas Fire reactivated a connection to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles—sites that had long receded into the background of my life, but remained formative in quieter ways.
The paintings developed in response to this encounter with a landscape visibly altered by fire. Scorched terrain, suspended light, and moments of unexpected stillness became points of attention. Rather than documenting specific events, the works move between observation and memory, holding together the physical reality of the land and a more internal, reflective register.
Across the series, different approaches emerge. In California I, the horizon dissolves into atmosphere, suggesting both openness and instability. California Burning: The 13th Hour after Anselm Kiefer draws on Kiefer’s material language of weight and erosion, with light breaking through dense, darkened surfaces. California Burning: Reflections in Solitude turns toward heightened colour and intensity, where the landscape appears on the verge of transformation. In contrast, California Burning: Yosemite Study adopts a more restrained, observational tone, attending to structure, form, and the persistence of the land beyond the immediacy of destruction.
This series occupies an important place within my wider practice. Made at a moment of return—both to California and to painting itself—it marks the point at which painting reasserted itself as a central mode of inquiry. The altered landscape became both subject and catalyst: a site through which questions of memory, identity, and continuity began to re-emerge and take form.
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