I do not really recreate places when I work. I reconstruct them.
There is a difference between copying what you see and translating what you remember. One is about accuracy. The other is about feeling. My work has always leaned toward the second.
I grew up just outside Anchorage, in Alaska, where landscapes are not just scenery. They are part of your daily awareness. You do not just look at mountains in the distance. You live with them. You adjust your sense of scale around them. Over time, they stop being objects and start becoming reference points for how you understand space, silence, and distance.
When I started drawing as a kid, I was not trying to capture exact views. I was trying to hold onto how things felt. A forest was not just trees. It was density, quiet pressure, and stillness that felt almost physical. A river was not just water. It was movement that changed how the land held itself together.
That way of seeing never left me. It just changed mediums.
What Memory Actually Keeps
Memory is not stable. It edits itself over time. Some details become sharper. Others disappear completely. What remains is usually not the most visually accurate version of something, but the most emotionally consistent version.
When I think about Alaska now, I do not see a perfect image of any specific place. I see fragments. A line of spruce trees against a gray sky. Snow that looks blue in early morning light. The feeling of distance that makes everything quieter than it should be.
Those fragments are what I work with when I paint. Not because I am trying to document anything, but because those are the parts that stayed with me the longest.
Tattooing works the same way for me, even though the surface is different. Skin is not a canvas you can step back from. It moves with a person. It changes shape depending on how they live. That means the work has to be built from something essential, not something dependent on exact representation.
Why I Do Not Copy Landscapes
I have never been interested in recreating a place exactly as it exists. I think something important gets lost when you do that. The image becomes fixed, but the experience of it never was.
No landscape is actually still. Even the quietest places are always shifting. Light changes. Weather changes. Your perception changes depending on where you stand and when you are there. A perfect copy flattens all of that into a single moment.
When I design something inspired by nature, I am not pulling from a photograph. I am pulling from a collection of impressions. I think about structure more than detail. I think about weight, balance, and atmosphere.
A mountain in my work is not meant to be a specific mountain. It is meant to feel like the idea of a mountain. Something grounded, stable, and quiet in its presence.
Chicago and the Distance of Memory
Moving to Chicago changed how I relate to the places I grew up in. You start to realize that memory gets sharper when you are no longer inside the environment that created it.
In Alaska, everything was immediate. You did not need to remember what the forest felt like because it was right there. In Chicago, I have to hold onto it differently. It becomes something I carry instead of something I am surrounded by.
That distance actually made my work more focused. When you are not constantly exposed to something, you start to isolate what matters most about it. I do not remember every detail of a specific trail or hillside. But I remember the way it made me feel to stand in it.
That feeling is what shows up in my paintings and tattoos now.
Making Something Permanent From Something Shifting
There is a strange tension in turning memory into something permanent. Memory itself is unstable. It changes every time you revisit it. But tattooing and painting both require decisions that do not change after they are made.
That forces a kind of honesty. I cannot rely on perfect recall. I have to rely on interpretation. I have to decide what version of a memory is worth preserving.
Most of the time, I choose simplicity. Not because the memory is simple, but because simplicity holds up better over time. It leaves room for the person looking at it to bring their own meaning into it.
That is something I have learned through experience. The more specific you try to make a memory, the more fragile it becomes. The more open it is, the longer it lasts.
What Stays After Everything Else Fades
I do not think my work is about preserving exact places. It is about preserving the way those places shaped how I see things.
Alaska is still in everything I make, but not as a location. It is there as structure, as rhythm, as a way of thinking about space and silence. It shows up in how I draw a line. It shows up in how I leave space untouched. It shows up in how I decide what not to include.
Memory, in that sense, is not something I am trying to hold onto. It is something I am working through.
And over time, I have learned that what lasts is not the detail of what I saw, but the feeling of having seen it at all.