Artist Statement
I often think of my paintings as film stills from a dream. A narrative is underway, but where it started, and where it is going is an open question. Every painting expresses the inevitability of change. These images of transformation could be reflections of our collective anxiety regarding current social, political and environmental concerns, or they could be totems of an individual mythology. Either way, they emerge from the evolutionary process of mining images from the subconscious, painting them, and seeing new symbolic possibilities that inspire further creation. It could be argued that the real subject of the work is how the psyche represents reality through images, with my own perspective serving as one example. The images, though rooted in personal subjectivity, reflect an awareness of historicity. I'm inspired by sources as varied as 13th century Sienese painting, Greek mythology, the Chicago Imagists, and 20th century cinema. Kubrick described film (and by extension, art in general) as images from the subconscious of the artist that appear to the viewer like a dream: clear in form, enigmatic and complex in content. It is the primacy of images which drives interpretation, not the other way around. Everything from the violent to the mundane is rendered into stable, distilled form, creating an aesthetic distance that allows one to contemplate scenes that in reality might be too intense, or too ordinary, to truly see.
