My recent paintings employ a multiplicity of contours that delineate the edges of things I find in a variety of source materials: glossy documentation of disaster, vintage guides to entertaining house guests, Sargent’s portraits of high society, or color copies of penitent saints by Spanish masters. These sources speak to a heightened order or disorder in the world, or embody a pronounced comfort or discomfort. (These dichotomies compound my own day-to-day experience with the natural order.) By layering observed contours to the point that the identity of the thing becomes interrupted or no longer recognizable, the image becomes consonant with a shifting, unsettling, mysterious world where what is known consistently shares an edge with what is not. My work, which can also include drawing and collage, traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle. Images that indefinitely propose or imply allow me to situate the viewer and myself as deferential participants, adventuring with the image rather than exercising omnipotence over it. What are we to make of the beauty that can accompany not knowing in full?