Clayton Merrell: Heat Index

"When I am at work in the studio, I am often trying to do two things at once:  to make lushly beautiful landscape images that reach toward the solace, scope and perspective that the natural world can provide, and to represent the destructive changes that we are rapidly unleashing on that world.  I am always looking for a peculiar balance – for images that can be simultaneously comforting and disquieting, familiar and disorienting, beautiful and bewildering.

In other words, I want to make a painting that conveys how beautiful our world is. I want to make a painting that conveys how broken our world is. I want them to be the same painting." -Clayton Merrell, August 2026