Growing up in a small rural area I became connected to art through the movies. I understood the common man in extraordinary circumstances and realized my attraction to the narrative. Relying on the unexpected mystery of everyday personal experience I began to use the photograph for painting. I look to it as a glance into an intimate world of another, arousing the emergence of a mysterious narrative. The role of the photograph is a very important component to the work but only as a departure because painting is the realization of the meaning.

When painting I use heightened color to get emotional tensions. Utilizing bright color coagulates the image into something other than reality, something more responsive and I feel that the painting is a tableau, a passage slides to places of awkward smearing and then forces the viewer to fill in the blanks, to answer the questions. In color the tableau of life is played against the abstract. To me the painting becomes more essential without the use of an anecdotal storyline. Apparent everyday scenes are invested with meaning beyond the ordinary.

I am obsessed with the structure of specific objects, architecture and figures, something to be built with paint for pure necessity. I then convey a temporary stillness within the moment of the painting. My relationship to these objects seems disruptive as if I were always breaking down the painting. When paint begins to solidify into structure, time is then halted and moments remain in the eternal. The painting is about to fall, about to collapse, for a sense of the anticipatory. In my paintings, structures and figures emerge from a vacillation between absolutely everything and almost nothing. What remains is both an existence and a non-existence.