Time to Release the Bee - First Look at My New Cookie Landscape Painting Series

 

Bee Dancing with Daisies (Cookie Landscape Number 2), 12”x12”, was just announced as a finalist for the Richeson75 Small Works 2025 Exhibition at the Richeson School of Art & Gallery in Kimberly, Wisconsin. It will be on view February 21 through April 2. The original will ultimately be made available through Hidell Brooks Gallery. Limited prints available now.

Please check out my painting process video on Tiktok. 

Work in progress...Here Comes the Sun, acrylic, 20" x 30...Can't wait to get the colors on this one!

This year, I’m launching a magical new trompe l’oeil painting series I’m calling Cookie Landscapes, or Cookiescapes. It consists of cheerful imaginary landscapes painted in a flat but illusionary style, and based on a strategic assortment of sugar cookies, gingerbread, frosting and sometimes candy that I make and assemble in my kitchen. Any appearance of texture or depth is create solely by layering the paint in a convincing way.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you may know that I’ve painted a number of small trompe l’oeil pieces in the past, including many custom recipe cards, but this Cookiescape series is something special for me, straight from my dreams and imagination, pulling on a sense of joy and wonder and a desperate hope to see magic in the world.

Why Cookies? Well, I could talk about how baking has been a part of my life since I was about 3, I could tell you about all the wonderful bakers in my family, or I could talk about my past experiences decorating cookies or learning to build gingerbread houses. But I think it’s more about cookies and frosting being tools that I can comfortably craft and manipulate to bring the visions I have in my head to life — much like a sculptor, I suppose, except my goal is to paint the final vision in such a convincing way that a viewer will get happily lost in the landscape before them.

These paintings are time-consuming and require a great deal of technical painting expertise, but I love making them, and I really hope they can incite a bit of magic and child-like optimism in those who see them.

I hope you’ll join me this year as I develop this body of work, and I ask that you help me share some happy art with others. As always, thanks for visiting! I hope my paintings make you smile!