The Blind Angler (2025)

20.9 x 17.9 | Oil on Canvas

This piece criticizes willful societal blindness to environmental degradation, asking, "If you keep pulling on a poisoned system, what exactly are you bringing up?"

A figure sits fishing on a lake that looks calm, almost pretty. But the water is dead from pollution. He pulls something out of the water that isn’t a fish; it’s worse. He’s blindfolded and smiles at what he caught. I’m interested here in willful blindness–not “we didn’t know,” but “we knew, and we decided not to know.” The red, sharp forms rising from the lake deliberately break the realism of the scene. They don’t belong in a peaceful landscape, and yet they do. Oil paint let me hold both moods at once: surface calm and submerged danger.