STATEMENT OF WORK

For the past five years I've been making paintings based on façades of local buildings, most of which have been abandoned and are in various states of decay or decrepitude. My approach to materials is an effort to describe this state, and the majority of the paintings have a pronounced third dimension. I do not particularly care if people recognise these buildings as French, but only that they sense their state of impermanence. 

In a more formal sense, I hope to invoke a mood, not necessarily based on locality, but more founded on technique, color, and composition. In this way my ambition is to speak to a larger audience. I think of them as transitions, and we now find ourselves all together in a large, common transition and are all facing the reality of impermanence. Of course, doors have long been associated with the idea of transition, the passage of time, and impermanence. The Romans frequently mounted a figure of the god Janus over doorways, the god having one face looking forward and one face looking back. So my reference to local phenomena is an attempt to address a larger human concern.

These are works on canvas. Most are 70 x 50 cm, and most have a pronounced third dimension. In many cases, the sculptural element is so prominent that I have constructed platforms on the bottoms of the work to support it. Materials are primarily oil paint and sand mixed as an aggregate, and this stuff is combined with other materials such as wood, foam core board, cardboard, paper, sheet metal, wire, and gravel. Among the eighty paintings in this group are about a dozen which are 40 x 20 cm, along with a few other small sizes. There are also a few paintings that are larger, 100 x 50 cm.