My painting practice explores how landscapes are viewed and experienced. My compositions are inspired by the formal qualities of the Midwest, with its flat horizon, repetitive crop fields, and dense prairies. Responding to direct interactions with nature while painting on site and representations of landscapes throughout art history, I explore how our ideas of a past landscape affect our understanding of nature in the present moment. I turn these often contradictory observations into oil paintings as a way to examine the relationship between memory, documentation, symbolism, and the presence of the land itself.