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The search for an essential form is a thread that has run through my work for several years, whether the subject was figures, flowers or ancestors. I look for a schema that is revealed by, but exists beyond, shifting conditions of light and space. I seek to determine how little information is enough, even as I experience an opposing desire to throw in every nuance I can get my hands on. It is the tension between those conflicting impulses that fuels my efforts in the studio.
Two genres have been central to my work: still life and portraiture. The portraits share a scale that places the subject at some distance from the viewer, yet invites an intimate relationship between viewer and painting. In the still life paintings, I depict a world within arm’s reach, within my grasp and control. In each of those genres, I explore extremes of simplicity and complexity, as well as oppositions of pictorial space that range from flat to deep.
Two recent bodies of work, an ancestor series and a series of drawings of couples, spring largely from my imagination. The ancestor paintings were derived from jpeg images I received via e-mail, of long-dead relatives I had never met. At first, I sought to flesh out the people I could know only through poor digital images. Over time, the paucity of information in the source material led to an increasing economy of paint handling, as well as an opportunity to invent and combine imagery from different sources.
While working on those ancestor paintings, I saw possibilities for finding imagery in unexpected places and using it to tell obscure stories from my imagination.
In the drawings of couples, I used found photographs as a source, taking liberties, sometimes undressing the figures, or making them resemble people I know. I transformed gestures and postures from one drawing to the next, for reasons not entirely clear to me as I went along.
Drawing is the means by which I try new ideas, without judgment, and expand upon them.
All of these efforts are united by the fact that they serve my intention, intuition and need to speak in a visual language of my own design.
My work is about the way I look and the way I see.
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