About The Work

This new body of rhapsodic paintings invite views to an evident beauty of things, which escapes rational analysis, paintings that tell no story but still speak to us. The destination is ultimately arbitrary and any thoughts generated by this work are a consequence of temperament, not intention.

The works are not planned but discovered. The canvas is used as site for mark making where certain formal narratives or dialogues are played out. Semi-figurative forms or full-blown figuration creep in and out between tropes of abstraction picture making.

The evolution of the paintings begins with a piling up of mental images and things seen and felt in the world, moods of the day, fantasies and simple human needs - as translated into paint. Each image is arrived at by both labor and an ever-changing internal logic that can refer to external impression/stimulant, but always remains quite particular to the mechanism of the picture itself. Decisions are built as reactions to both preceding marks and to the normal delusions and expectations of painting.

Scale is used to avoid heroics and spectacular appearance, but to maintain the ambiguity of the object/image duality. Emotional content and context is established by the tensions formed between the desire for recognition and the lack of satisfaction in naming what is seen. The work is never static- as soon as something starts to emerge or solidify in the paintings, a movement away from that clarity begins and a shift toward ambiguity and openness begins. Spaces and forms are a loose assembly rather than delineated neatly and coherently.

There is a constant prompting to real world things and to narrative, but are realized only in pieces and in parts. This type of painting utilizes the strategy of replacing emotional and intellectual thinking with formal thinking, therefore formal decisions are proxy for conceptual decisions- devises, such as collage-space, substitutions, palimpsest, disruption, destruction- are used to breath form into the paintings, whereby turning destructive impulses into constructive realities. This all acts as a projection of sorts, or translation from one type of experience of the world into another, plastic form.

There is an attempt here to capture an immediate and raw feeling, coupled with sophisticated spatial and technical reversals and confusions. The effort is to capture and picture sensations, highly charged emotional states outside of description, that are not fitting to the world of ready made images, words nor intellectualization. Experiences such as the birth of a first child, or the confusion between a thinking and feeling subject color these paintings. This is achieved within the confines and contradictions of the medium of painting- relating my artistic doubts and how I positions myself with regard to the history of painting. These paintings show a unique, skeptical exuberance to the joy of existence, and the burn of being in time at all.