My work is an exploration of ways to build paintings, and considerations about the life of a painting. I try to make images that reflect not natural spaces, or dream spaces, but waking brain space. Each type of painting I make involves the use of a “shell” that invites addition, and allows for the preservation of some type of open-endedness. In the case of this series, the open-endedness is achieved through the preservation of the white of the canvas. The painting is built from front to back, and seemingly could move infinitely into this space. These paintings, like our own heads, are also comprised of images from varying sources. The photographic, the imagined, and the observed come together in a loosely sculptural configuration of figure and object. In my mind these configurations take form as secular, modern day icon/martyr paintings. I’m taking an image that is personal, and person-specific, and enmeshing it in a bed of equations formed by objects, to an end that is more widely resonant than the initial starting point, the portrait devoid of context. The objects in question are grown from a hodgepodge of sources, from the domestic to the dream-based, and claim a vague and mixed ownership, my own and the sitter’s. Bits of imagery based in memory, desire, or circumstantial reality are matched up edges to edge, one element falling in behind another until the whole of it presses forward in one jumbled piece. The figure is inevitably identified as the propagator and owner of these objects, which grow up from behind the body, and therefore seem to be borne on the back. It is here in the addition of the weight of these things that decoration becomes burden.