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

My “marks” examine the fleeting nature of power and permanence through common and sometimes somewhat comical motifs such as stickers, flags, quilts, popsicles, and temporary tattoos. Questions surrounding patriotism, pride, and partisanship emerge in work that is both satirical and idealistic.

My work is driven by the transformation and manipulation of traditional and non-traditional materials and the exploration of unorthodox techniques. The work balances accident with control and gives permanence to the ephemeral. The absence of an original and the use of elaborate processes are inherent to my smoke, painting, and porcelain series.

I paint to try to make sense of this life and the world in which we live. This journey usually begins in familiar places from my childhood—rural landscapes and abandoned structures of the Carolinas. Combining a love of oil paint and art history, I’m interested in both creating and exploring psychological spaces, where mind and matter coalesce. I depict these icons of the American South not to monumentalize, but rather to question our histories and identities embedded and reflected within them. Nostalgia, violence, loss, love, guilt, fragility, shame, and complicity coexist.

I am a painter and a collector of fabric and clothing, most of which I find amid the dregs of fashion castoffs. I am drawn to this material as subject, as a proxy for abstract painting, as an alternative support for painterly marks, and as a vehicle of corporeal domesticity.

I am influenced by many things—vintage punk rock, VHS tapes, Internet blogs, World War I battleships, beat-up amps, and custom guitars all play a role in the development of my paintings and digital prints.

For the past four years, the notion of cycle has played an increasing role within my studio practice. During this time, I’ve became interested in how avant-garde movements succeed and fail within popular culture.

My painting and drawing is a visual language that is vague, abstract, clear, arbitrary, deep, shallow, fiction, real, emotional, conceptual, or indecipherable. I tell stories. The story you see might be different from the one I’m telling. I continue every day to speak my language and develop it. I talk to the surface, usually paper. I paint, it happens.

I make paintings that are informed by and react to a culture defined by the digital experience. My work references familiar technology-created images—photography, X-rays, or Photoshop filters—yet is created through the meticulous application of paint alone. By referencing the digital image, my paintings walk the line between something and nothing. They play to our expectations of both the disposable contemporary image and the valued tradition of the handmade.