Stephen Thorpe: Half in Love with Oblivion marks a significant shift following the artist's relocation to the Mojave Desert, opening the psychological interiority of his earlier domestic paintings outward into vast symbolic landscapes. Rooms give way to caves — spaces hewn from earth itself, ancient and geological — while mountains emerge through apertures and cavernous openings as archetypes of transcendence and transformation. The desert becomes not merely a setting but a field of perception in which inner and outer experience dissolve. Drawing on Romantic landscape painting, Symbolism, and Eastern philosophical traditions, Thorpe constructs psychological landscapes shaped as much by myth and memory as by observation.
