Artist Statement

As an American painter, my representational art is steeped with rich hues and textures to convey the complex psychological and sociological realities of modern life.

I am a reader of fiction. I’m drawn to exquisite prose. I make notes of texts that might conjure an idea for a painting. Sometimes it’s a few words: “prized possessions, precious memorabilia,” sometimes it’s a fragment of a sentence: “my youth gone subterranean as a dream,” other times it can be an entire sentence: “Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are continually inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.” For me, these texts open a portal into the landscape of life in 21st Century America.

The texts that I collect guide me to a place I love to be — in my head tossing around ideas and trying to figure out how to bring those ideas into the world as a painting. The texts that I collect express the mystery of contemporary life. They scratch at concepts that can seem banal and at the same time strangely enigmatic. Some of the texts were jotted down decades ago, but they still hold a fascination for me and I know I will paint them one day. The texts are often used as titles. It’s important for me that viewers have the title to welcome them into the painting; where they go from there is part of their personal mystery.