STATEMENT OF WORK

There are multiple threads that weave through my work, but they all start from the constructed fantastical world that I use as a venue for storytelling. Characters, places, and narratives are cousins of those that we encounter in our world, but they lie outside the parameters and fall between the categories that contain us. I start with a landscape, through which I introduce portraiture, figurative painting, abstraction, or a combination of these motifs. Likewise, the subject itself can often flit in the spaces between ideas: there might be work that is about personal loss, but at the same time it is about ambition or contemporary politics. My aesthetic is also mercurial - a painting might contain natural and unnatural elements simultaneously, one tree realistically rendered but surrounded by flat graphic shapes or areas of physical paint that destroy any illusion of space.

The inbetweenness I described above is indicative, I believe, of the way we actually process our time in the world; we are influenced by myriad sources, all of them potentially powerful, and this includes sources from myriad visual languages. So one thing I would like viewers to get when looking at my work, is that I'm trying to visually (and I suppose conceptually) synthesize things that don't normally go together, and I don't know what that looks like! Each painting evolves with its own problems, without a distinct formula or game plan, towards 'a more perfect union'. It's not the easiest way to make art, but it has become the most appropriate way for me to do so.