My current art making practice is rooted in painting and drawing, though I have had many years of interdisciplinary art making- my beginnings in 3D via civil engineering at Cornell led to an international experience studying in and traveling throughout Europe and an expanded world view, moving towards sculpture with welding, woodworking, glass + bronze casting, papermaking, followed by an interdisciplinary degree from SFAI with focuses on more welding, printmaking, ceramics, film, photography, drawing, painting, fibers, animation, and then a master’s degree at Goldsmiths driving to research, critique, and discourse on the subject to which I constantly return- place, home, and identity.

My recent paintings of interior spaces continue the trajectory of my practice-based research. They sometimes include figures and often do not. Figures are either solidly fixed within their spaces, occupied and distracted, or they have apparently very recently vacated, leaving evidence of their presence and anticipation of their eventual return. This impression that someone has recently departed or is about to arrive amplifies the experience of the empty spaces, which are otherwise very full of detail- an open door, lights left on, television playing, a bag on the floor, ephemera on the table.

While some areas of the painting are carefully attended to in fine detail, other parts are un-rendered while still maintaining an essential presence in the overall scene. I draw with paint on canvases prepared with absorbent ground to create the underpainting. Drawing is a form of thinking - continuing the painting is a refinement of the thinking - the movement from drawing to painting happens over the duration of making a painting - and I sometimes return to drawing well into the painting process. Drawing is transverse in this way.

My paintings take as their starting point the limit of photography and use photos as a catalog of memories. The vantage point of these works takes the broadest possible view of the spaces they depict, like establishing shots in cinema. Looking through a doorway or from a far corner of a room, a personal sensibility is cultivated. The photo is a memory and revisiting the photo/memory allows for an extended re-addressing of a moment, a modern memento-mori, wherein each object bespeaks the longing of loss and spiritual aura, one person’s mess is another’s monument, both equally meaningful. Painted on paper-like canvas surfaces that absorb as much as they support, my subjectivity possesses a tactile clarity that has as much to do with finish as representation. The titles of these works begin the telling of a story where the interior or close-cropped still-life becomes a portrait of its owner-occupier. Titles are reflections on and collaborations with poetry and lyrics.

Color is important to me- the phenomenon of color is an intergenerational concern of painters- as it is at once difficult and enigmatic. This has led to my secondary practice of “End of Palette Rainbows” that engage in an economy of materials by utilizing the remnants of an acrylic painting process expressed iteratively through the repetition of form. I have a specific palette of colors that I return to repeatedly in my painting practice and use the small amounts of leftover paint that would otherwise dry out and be discarded to make the “End of Palette Rainbows,” which are worked on over a period of four to five separate painting sessions. The rainbow is a highly recognizable, symbolically charged symbol or trope that also lends itself to variability and interchangeability parsing every color in the visible spectrum into an arching array- an exercise in scalability, rearrangeability and compositional variations.