artist statement
Current working statement
No matter how close our friends and family might be, we are all alone in the world.
After all, no one else shares your brain. It is that terrifying and exhilarating certainty
that interests me. Acknowledging that isolation, how do we interact with people?
To explore this dilemma, i seek out immersive, familiar, and specific yet ephemeral
moments in shared public spaces. Often it is not the people who are principal in my
paintings, but rather the space between them and how that space (or lack thereof)
behaves. In an era of evermore constructed false social walls – iPods and their
headphones, Skype and Facebook with their illusions of closeness – i feel coming
face to face with a physical object made with my own two hands provides insight
to these adrift connections.
I attempt to interpret these fleeting moments by working from a toned ground,
building up pigment but also removing it to create a rich and varied surface.
I seek to conjure tangible moodiness by developing a desirable imbalance of contrasts,
primarily by utilizing the impact of value followed by shifts in temperature. I engage
gestural and observational representation not only to suggest what something is,
but also employ differing levels of delineation to express how elements cooperate
or oppose one and other in a composition.
Permeating my visual process are the works of Rembrandt, 17th century Dutch genre
painting, Lautrec, Degas, and the Ashcan school (in particular Bellows, Eakins, and
Hopper). These artists observed the world for what it was, often focusing on the quality
of light even when painting dark subject matter. In doing this they illuminated
the beguiling possibilities beyond our alienation.
In the end i seek to distill and reveal the vast under-appreciated power of our
responses to brief commonplace moments. I try to find the sublime in the mundane,
and see the impact of the momentary as we live with our ever-present isolation.
Now, back to work.