The organization of space, the essentiality of color, and the quality of light fascinate me. Depicting the natural world exactly is not what I do. Instead, my work reflects what I see and how I feel over time. I generally develop the painting from several small drawings worked on location.

My work is based on autobiographical events in day-to-day life. I draw from a variety of source material and practices, ranging from personal and found photographs to abstraction and direct observation.

I make paintings of the figure as a way to understand desire, which functions in my work in part as a fantasy about being both subject and maker. Throughout my childhood, I was a frequent subject of my father’s paintings and photographs, resulting in my being potently aware, from a very young age, of being looked at and depicted.

I have always been a vivid dreamer. Some years ago, I started journaling when I woke up. What fascinates me are the bizarre images that come to me, such as a deceased friend looking at her tiny skeleton in a shoe box, fish swimming by in a subway station, or a dress made out of Wonderbread wrappers that needs a zipper. Sometimes it is a whole scene or narrative, sometimes a word or two, and sometimes just an image. At first, these were just for my own contemplation and amusement. They were too intimate and embarrassing to share with anyone. Gradually, after

I am fascinated with qualia and the nature of our perception. My paintings are explorations in Chromoluminarism, ambiguous geometry, and abstract illusion. I often incorporate the Pareidolia Effect (the psychological phenomenon whereby the viewer’s brain organizes abstract elements into familiar patterns, shapes, and forms unique to the individual). Through the device of pareidolia, I intend that the viewer rather than the image provide meaning. By creating a visual field in which image and color blend optically and shift as the viewer interacts with the painting, I destabilize

For these works, I took facial impressions with foil and made paintings of the masks’ interiors from observation. The inverted features become reverse portraits, the inside of someone’s head abstracted into unrecognizable prisms of reflected color. Painting will be dead when looking is dead, when we start receiving all visual input from video transmissions sent to the chip implanted in the visual cortex of our brains rather than through our eyes. Then the physicality of an image won’t matter, because nothing will have physicality. Since those days are coming soon, I

I am looking at systems and how they are used to better understand other fields, how they are employed in society, and what purpose they serve. I look through the lens of cybernetics to find a context for these inquiries. Cybernetics is a human-tomachine relationship that calculates and predicts the outcomes and consequences of systems. This field seeks to find the best solutions and the perfect equation for a particular area, such as ecological or social systems. Often, the goal of cybernetics is to find hidden connections that machines can see and that the

I’d rather not be indoors while painting, so usually I paint scenarios I long for. Over the past several years, I have embarked on three bicycle tours exploring 4,000 miles of American desert and coastline, seeking time away from the spectacle of society as well as learning to be quiet in nature. In presenting these distinctly North American landscapes and playscapes, I imagine distant human pasts as well as potentially distant futures.

Meditation before starting to work is imperative for me. It helps ground me in the present, attuning me to the immediate task of drawing and painting. My process begins in drawing and culminates in painting. Having a varied practice is fundamental. Currently my work involves figuration, abstraction, landscape, humor, friendship, science fiction, soccer, Greek history, and anthropomorphism.

My recent paintings are concerned with geometric abstraction, decoration, repetition, and their intersection with representations of nature and natural forms. They contain collisions of color, pattern, and form that move over and against themselves. These cut-canvas, layered paintings are textured with inlaid symbols, with multiple layers of surface coming together to simultaneously form and disrupt the image. The work explores utopian ideals of beauty and structure converging with the chaos of chance and process.