Koegel stripped the house to its concrete floors. But the half-boat stayed untouched. After all, the boat isn't too different from Koegel's paintings, in which the natural blends with the man-made, where growth takes place along decay.

Koegel, 45, grew up in Placentia and studied visual arts at Cal State Fullerton. He worked as an advertising art director for many years, before focusing on fine art painting about six years ago. His paintings play with your sense of space. Buildings and objects are rendered flatly and often suspended in air. Look closely, and you'll notice that shapes and silhouettes suggest multiple objects. For example, in rootball, fat, cloud-like tubes of pink and red extend below a house. The tubes look like tree trunks and roots, but also giant intestines. In another painting, an astronaut floats in space. Or perhaps considering the presence of a ship, it's a blue ocean that he's suspended in.

In hindsight, Koegel thinks his latest paintings, where organic objects figure more prominently than before, may have been influenced by the imagery of recent natural disasters. "All the stuff you see in the papers and with the landslide in my neighborhood, and the tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. I have a stack of clippings, and it's all the same aesthetics, the same kind of visual – tangled-up stuff. And I'd never seen so much of it, consistently, all year long," he said.

Not that the disasters didn't cause Koegel dismay, but what comes through in his paintings isn't so much a fear of nature or pity for the victims, as his continual curiosity of the way people interact with landscapes. In "Threshold of Liberty," a house is cut away to expose broken beams and ragged walls. A tarp covers the roof and attempts to hold the pieces in place. In another painting, street flower, thick smoke billows out of a factory to form the silhouettes of a temple, a mosque's dome, and what looks like a nuclear plant. Bare tree trunks (or are these blood vessels?) loom on the right, hinting at the destruction caused by the smoke. Both the backgrounds of threshold of liberty and street flower are colored in cheery yellow.

"I think a lot of people read into images of pollution, the chopped-down trees, the rape of the land and all that. But they're rendered tenderly. The painting of a chopped- down forest is different than a chopped-down forest," Koegel said. "I don't have environmental motivation for making the work. I love the earth and I want to take care of it, but I think paintings are really about what it is to be a person, what it means to be alive. Humans do awful things to the earth, and amazing things with it, too. The landscape is kind of a singular being, and it doesn't die," Koegel said. "It's going to last longer than we do. We're part of it. It's constantly in a state of being re-born."