About
My paintings depict a world hidden within my mind where imagined
interiors, and animals enact a psychological dark comedy. A squiggle
of ground meat, a cat?s meow mistaken for a scream, or a comically
disillusioned fish being fileted before our eyes, all draw the
viewer's attention to the melancholic and at times, brutal tone of the
imagery. These subjects suggest existential dread, but that dread is
undermined by humor, lively paint handling, and the use of a saturated
palette. This self-defeating melodrama points to an ambivalent view of
existence, to a need to laugh and cry and scream at once.
The paintings begin simply, often catalyzed by a basic paint idea or
single nagging image. I am always searching for ways of upsetting
familiarity within my world by treating areas of the canvas
disparately, and by allowing a myriad of textures to coexist. As I
work, I search for and then encourage the points where paint
overwhelms the subject. When this happens, unexpected things are
unearthed, things that are necessarily unplanned and unnamable, and
that seem intrinsic to the material itself.
