I was always enamored by landscape paintings, even when I was a child. There was a desire to walk into those canvases and see the world the artists had rendered so beautifully. I quickly learned, however, that I could only view those worlds through the artist’s creation—whether that be because it was a painting of nostalgia, or because the image the artist rendered never really existed except on canvas.

I try to capture some of that same magic with my photographs. I want to evoke that same response and show a world that makes a viewer want to walk right through the photograph and into the scene itself. I modify my photographs to appear more like a painting to intentionally play with those ideas of nostalgia, while maintaining the original composition of the photograph, thus showing the world as it was the moment I snapped the picture. Nature tends to be fluid and ever-changing, and if we don’t hold on to what we have, it’ll be gone.