Infused with lighthearted arbitrariness, my paintings tell amusing anecdotes about love and affection in an often cold and hostile world. Mostly, the work percolates life’s imperfections. The paintings do not take issues of decorum all that seriously, refusing to separate matters of taste from larger questions about “good behavior.” Showing all sorts of sensuous events, from the casual encounter to highly formalized lovemaking (and everything in between), the works are miniaturized schemas of love, desire, pleasure, tragedy, and cosmic disorder.

The burlesque-like images and the theatrical incidents they usually describe allow for both empathy and confusion, while projecting a capricious irritability, with comic bumps along the way. Visual sources are those of Rococo art and chinoiserie of the eighteenth century, as well as Chinese Pleasure Garden paintings and the work of French painters Boucher and Fragonard. The narratives remain incomplete, never really telling a coherent story, and thus resemble abstracted tropes concerning romantic folly and loss.