I paint astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, 8 years before I was born, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how it was received. I don't know if people genuinely believed we'd be living in space, that we'd have robot butlers and flying cars, geodesic lunar homes, and genetically reconstituted dinosaurs helping or maybe eating us. But from Lost in Space to The Jetsons to Jurassic Park, popular culture has long treasured this space-age perception of the future. Generations raised on these programs, movies, and comics are now grown and living in a future filled with mini vans, Starbucks, iMacs, and Hip Hop videos. In many ways, the year 2001 failed to live up to expectations. And yet the world today is strange and unusual in ways unimagined in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, or in 1968, when 2001 was released, or even in the early years of the internet. The present is in fact a very unusual place, and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted.

The astronaut in my paintings is simply here to explore the present.