I make paintings that traffic in ideas from politics to social culture, from serious to not so serious (funny). I count amongst my influences the spirits of Mark Twain, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Kerouac, Erich von Stroheim, Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Ernest Hemingway, Gloria Swanson, Maynard G. Krebs, W.C.

These paintings are based on photographs of models, and engage in a significant filtration process. Physical facts are inevitably simplified and distorted, as real-world signifiers are transformed first into a model, then a photograph, and finally a painting. Some of these works examine the many ways Americans have experienced the Iraq war, and address issues of power and powerlessness as manifested in human interaction during wartime. Model figures and toy dolls represent the housewife, the student, the businessman, the soldier; all occupy the uneasy utopia of a model world.

Most of my compositions consist of simple bands of colored and textured paint that overlap to form a web of color with a range of surface varieties. Through the numerous applications of paint evolves a complex layer of textured pattern. With my obsessive working process, I am able to compile paint of different consistencies to form a complex object that focuses on the fluid qualities of paint itself.

Painted presentations of visceral bacchanalia, hillbilly witchcraft, and degenerate portraiture.

The works are glimpses of narratives, with a focus on the human figure. The characters belong to their own social contexts, where fictitious chaos meets blatant references, satirical violence, and humor. They act on their animal (often maniacal and sexual) nature with exploited and often tragic exiguity.

Darkness is the condition from which we all come. It is the matrix of infinite form and possibility from which light picks and chooses the objects it illuminates and brings into existence. In my art, I have discovered parallels between this interplay of darkness and light, and the interplay of black ink and white paper. The subjects of my current body of work may be the Louisiana animals and vegetation which surround me (both of which have fascinated me since I was a child growing up amongst sugar cane farmers in and around the exotic environs of Avery Island).

Much of my personal work is an exploration on the subject of home, from a self-reflective and self-critical perspective. Home is defined as being the place where a person, family, or household lives, but can home only be defined as a physical landscape? By creating a series of visual allegories, my work both documents and strives to interpret the key constituents which identify home and make it distinct from any other place.

My reading of Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space” has had a profound effect on how I relate my own personal space to memories and experiences. Substituting furniture, doorways, windows, or other domestic architectural elements with these geometric forms separates the viewer from the memories of my past spaces that the original objects lived in. To further enhance the ambiguity of the space, I have been exploring “the blank,” an abstract form that may be read as a negative space, a solid object, or even a thought bubble.

Portrait, still life, landscape, history, and traditional genres of painting are broken down through symbols, marks taken from tattooed skin, walls of graffiti, and open public media. These images, which are collected and archived as source material, are altered, layered, flattened, and re-contextualized to become emblems of contemporary documentary. They are then presented in the format of a backdrop or stage, size and configuration dictating a space in which something more happens.

In my paintings, I endeavor to focus on the interstices of architectural space in an attempt to marry the inside with outside. Consequently, I seek to depict structures from several different perspectives and sometimes repeatedly as a means to emphasize fluctuations of mood and emotion. The constructions in these works exist only as paint, yet they allow me to lay the foundation necessary to explore questions of time and permanence. I present a detached viewpoint and generate room for introspection, where a sense of silence permeates.

My paintings attempt to show the phenomena of contemporary cities and spaces from my own embodied perception, that is, from the perspective of being inside these as opposed to viewing them from afar. Thus, my personal experience of the environment pervades; objects and spaces exist in an amplified setting in which the excesses of our society have created an abundance of remnants. I endeavor to counter this fragmentation with an expression of harmony, to generate a feeling of accord that emerges in an atmosphere of dissonance.