"The least the historian can do with any historical fact is to select and affirm it. To select and affirm even the simplest complex of facts is to give them a certain place in a certain pattern of ideas, and this alone is sufficient to give them a special meaning."

- Carl Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian" (1932)

The images in my paintings are too full of contradiction, distortion, and misrepresented facts to ever document their subject with an accurate historic description. Still, painting is a good way to look at something of interest and an opportunity to measure it. I collect my facts and combine them in ways that best suit the picture and what I hope to see. Each painting provides a number of technical problems that need to be worked out and with luck, in the process of painting and dealing with the materials, I will lose sight of the original idea and come up with a product that I did not expect.

Often I revel in the tedious details of the built environment that my aesthetic training originally taught me to hate. Tracking the motion of the sun over a suburban strip mall, vinyl clad housing, or the ubiquitous chain link fence; the subject of my painting is frequently a visual irritation that gets under my skin. Working with the pest, I usually manage to eke out some kind of beauty, even if satire or derision were the original intent. Happy as a duck in a flood, this pursuit of the mundane and personally irksome has provided me with a wide source of inspiration.