Painting as Object is about bringing attention to the materiality of a painting and its objectness. By cutting into the surface of the panel and creating a reversed area in which to paint I am pushing the painting itself into the realm of sculpture. I am revealing the paintings’ physical depth along with its flat pictorial illusional surface. My painting Postcard with Wild Prairie Rose is influenced by traditional landscapes with notions of foreground and background, movement and structure. Thought has been given to spatial themes through compositional experimentation, and the capture of certain tensions and moments of balance. By cutting into the panel and creating a separate painting space I am inviting the viewer to consider the work as sculpture or as painting or both. To assess whether the cutout area is a painting on its own or maybe the history of the layers we see in the result of the larger painting. This 3 dimensional space provides a new dialog about the intuitive application of paint and mediums on the surface as a whole. If you will, a painting with a sculpture within a painting.