As a narrator, I am unreliable and in control of the pronouns. Paintings are easily trusted; I am interested in the consequences of this trust and the way it affects our viewing and reading of a given painting. My figures live in the shallow space between characters and their representation. I try to fit things together until they sound right. There’s a lot of looking.

My art connects the origins of punk music to the urges of the Romantics and the trials of Dante as he wrote his medieval epic poem The Divine Comedy. In 2010, I had a dream about “The Flame,” a state of being that belongs somewhere between the legendary performances at the Rock ’n’ Roll Farm of Wayne, Michigan, and Twin Peaks’s Bang Bang Bar. Using installations, drawings, paintings, and sculptures to explore the world of The Flame, I wonder if this is the place youthful dreams go to die, or where new dreams are born?

Mundane events, personal failures, day-to-day experiences, and art history fuel my work. I approach every painting with a sense of urgency and humor. Images and subjects arrive through the action of painting, and are destroyed and rebuilt through trial and error. I use painting to depict my experiences of a frenetic, beautiful, and terrifying world.

I am interested in the link between words and meaning, and the creation of a surplus of value through interpretation. In the project Rise Above, a phonetic variation demolishes the expectations of the demand made in the title: “rise above” comes to mean something completely different—“rice above.”

My mom bought me a set of paints when I was a teenager. The first yield was a clumsy forest scene in which, despite its many problems, I saw some potential. If I could travel back in time to tell myself about the next fifteen years, I would explain that the outcome of that potential will continue to elude me and my peers. Sadly, we’ll have to watch beautiful minds fade from drugs and the crushing weight of societal pressures, and, worse, transform into pale pedantic shadows of their formerly vigorous selves. We must be on the wrong path! I’m sure that stupid kid would say he