African horizons

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African Horizons grew out of my time spent moving across the continent — from Cote d’Ivoire where I lived while in the Peace Corps, through desert, savanna, coastline, and river delta — and the realization that what stayed with me afterward was rarely a scene. Whether Burkina Faso or Timbuktu, or dreams of Congo, it was a horizon: a single line where light met land, and the particular color the air turned in that moment.

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Each painting in this series is built from two elements held in tension. The first is atmosphere — loose, saturated watercolor washes that carry the memory or imagining of a specific place and time of day: the molten reds of the Sahara at dusk, the cool fog over Gorée Island, the near-black stillness of a Somali coastline. The second is a single gesture in ink — a horizon line, a ridge, a river's edge — drawn fast and left alone. That line is doing more than describing terrain. In Kalahari it becomes ibex antelope horns; in Kavango, something like root systems or reeds. It is the human mark against the vastness of the wash; the moment memory sharpens into shape.

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I did not set out to paint documentary landscapes, and none of these should be read as a literal record of a specific view. They are closer to afterimages — what the eye keeps replaying once the place itself has receded. Taken together, the fifteen paintings (six shown below) form a kind of loose itinerary across the continent, but they are meant to be felt more than mapped: each a held breath at the edge of a place, at the edge of light.