My paintings express a unity between formal organic-geometric abstraction and suggestive and metaphorical representation. They allude to the shapes, colors, sounds, and movements of the urban environment and its larger landscape. While remaining visually formal and abstract, linked to art-historical traditions, they invite viewers to imagine pictorial narratives or content that is both personal and public.

I remember learning about the ability to X-ray a painting, to examine the previous layers of paint and their application. Learning that you could see naked underpaintings, even mistakes and corrections. Could painters, with only one canvas for their entire life, make hundreds of paintings on that one surface? Can we think about flat, two-dimensional space in a four-dimensional, time-based way? A seed of that question germinates in my current palimpsestic method: the history of processed accretion is a present and available ghost. In my paintings, I reference

My paintings are derived from close visual observation of subjects that are primarily manufactured items. I find beauty in these items, and I enjoy the challenge of accurately re-creating them in paint. For me, a smooth panel, free of the interrupting canvas texture, is the ideal surface on which to paint.

I am interested in surfaces and textures—both physical and optical. My paintings are experiments comprised of shapes, lines, shapes within shapes, color runs, and bleeds. They are like hard-edged paintings, with flats of color composed in geometric arrangements, but they are developed through layers over a period of time, and have softer edges. The effect is akin to that of patinas created by natural processes, with pigments dispersed in the fabric of the support, suggesting a historical and structured narrative.

The work of art makes the statement or it does not. Look. Listen. Feel. Decide. For when the observation occurs, the visual experience becomes complete.

My paintings explore re-imagined nostalgia and self-help as a distraction from the everyday. These narrative depictions of new or recreated experiences are salves for my subjects’ self-loathing, fear, and boredom. My process oscillates between predetermined and intuitive painting. Each approach takes its turn as remedy and provoker, altering the power dynamic between my compositions and myself. The commonality between approaches manifests in one shared goal: like the excitement of recalling a memory or making a new discovery, in each piece I aim to conjure a moment

I’ve had an interest in drawing, and portraiture in particular, since I started out as an artist at a very early age. My motivation to continuously draw over the years has led (quite by accident) to what has turned out to be what I’m hoping is an individual kind of mark-making. Since around the turn of this century, this body of work has been my formal playground for line, texture, volume, form, and so on, along with what has turned out also to be a subtle (or not so subtle) commentary on self-image in our current popular culture that seems to be asking, Who’s to say what’s beautiful?

“We live in a linguistic culture and everything has to be turned into language. People don’t understand anything until you’ve explained it.” This is a form of visual obtuseness that comes from being raised on television—“which absolutely deadens the imagination and deadens the senses. You just sit there with your mouth open.” –Emma Brockes, quoting Carl Andre, in “I’m a Hopeless Drawer— and a Terrible Painter,” 2013

Slipping in and out of the familiar through abstract mark-making, my paintings draw parallels between nature and human nature. Paint application ranges from thin, willowy, fanglike strokes to thick juicy plumages of clustered marks. These shapes coalesce into landscape and figure, eventually dissipating into abstract impressions. My hope is that viewers will encounter their inner realities by engaging the work’s limbo state.

Whether highly designed or purely utilitarian, there is no denying the simple elegance and beauty of teacups and teapots. Drinking tea goes back thousands of years. Its history is complicated and spreads across multiple cultures. Tea ceremonies, customs, and rituals arose where tea vessels play an important and necessary role. Asian tea ceremonies and customs contain an adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday life.1 Europeans engage in rituals of high tea or afternoon tea, while the American tea culture can trace its roots back to the Dutch settlers.