I grew up quite sheltered, largely due to childhood health problems, and so never traveled until I was in my early twenties. When I began exploring the US, and then the world, I discovered that each place I visited typically had at least one primary characteristic that forever burned itself into my brain and was, from then on, an immediate and indelible association with that place. In the case of England, that thing is a color: green. England is beautifully, unbelievably, preternaturally green, and nowhere is that truer than in the North of England, places like the Yorkshire Dales, where I encountered the subject of this painting. I was so taken by the miles of endless, vibrant green, broken only by ancient stone walls and the abundant punctuations of sheep. Their shapes, as simple and reductive as Henry Moore Sculptures against the swaths of verdure, inspired me to create the background pattern in “White on Green.”

“White on Green” is part of my pattern series, in which I reduce the subject to a silhouetted, stamp-like form, and repeat that shape to create a background pattern, pitting the animal against a mass-produced image of itself. In most cases, the effect is humorous, evoking the animal’s ubiquity, life cycle, or reproductive capacity. With the inescapable pop art references, one is reminded of Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Wayne Theibauld’s regimented displays of puddings. In all cases, this systematization of a natural shape highlights the significance of the animal in human life and culture. In this case, meat and wool production are important functions of the sheep. Additionally, this tableau of white on green is, for me, an immediate and emblematic representation of the English Countryside.