Artist Statement

In my paintings I aim to arrive at an image that harkens back to something we already know, something archetypal. Recently the paintings, which primarily delight in the nuance of painterly language and virtuoso passages of paint, come together with crudely drawn symbols in something like a visual version of Jungian interpretation. The symbols are gleaned equally from realms of mystery, and of the mundane, and one will often masquerade as the other. The painting is experienced on multiple levels, in the subtleties of delicately rendered elements, and in the immediacy of readily interpreted symbols, simultaneously. All of the mind’s musings, including those trivial and ontological, find their voice on my surfaces, and the paintings regularly employ their symbolic system to diagram the brain’s most favored and futile concern, that of the enigma of possibility.

Icon Statement

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.

Empty Paintings

These pieces are from a series of “empty paintings.” The empty paintings all begin as paintings of empty New York apartment spaces, and slowly, over time I begin to occupy the space with people and/or objects. This process of working grew from my experience of moving from the spacious and rambling South, to New York City where I witnessed people from all over the world trying to fit themselves and the personal histories that come with them, into tiny spaces. The results are often funny, and awkward, but at times the incongruity is very beautiful. I’m looking to set up similar situations in these paintings, by forcing elements that represent aspects of my own personal history into these alien spaces.

The objects have all been captured, by photograph or memory, in other places, and are forced to share a space where they don’t belong. However the objects never really affect the space they occupy, nor does the space affect the object. For example nothing casts a shadow onto what is around it, and there is no reflected light. This gives the painting a kind of transient quality, as if any of its elements could evaporate at any moment, and because of this, it is possible to keep intact a sense of the room’s original emptiness even in a cluttered painting.

There is also a time-based element to the work. The empty paintings are all in different states of occupation (some are quite cluttered, and some have yet to have their emptiness disturbed), but in any state (as long as I own them), they are always and never finished, and they are subject to exhibition at any stage. In this way the collector participates in the final outcome of the painting, because they decide they want the painting in the state they see it in, and it is bought, and at that point the piece finds its completion. The purchase of the painting is the only act capable of concluding its evolution.

Imaginary Sculptures

Unlike the Empty Paintings, the Imaginary Sculptures are conceived all at one as a single piece. The “sculptures” are paintings of objects or configurations of objects imagined into the gallery space where the piece is shown. When someone decides they want the piece, the sculpture is “reinstalled” by making a new painting of the space where they would like to have the objects, and painting them into this new painting of space. The objects never materialize into 3 dimensions, but they are moveable nonetheless.