STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings are quiet yet vivid encounters that play with perspective. They usually start out as snapshots taken with my phone, sometimes intentionally composed but more often captured fleetingly. Photos mindlessly accumulate daily. My preoccupations inform the ones I pick to paint: friends, pets, art, technology, philosophy, literature. What begins as a scene gets tightly cropped, zoomed-in, blown up, and edited so all that is left is a standalone figure, a moment within a moment. I then spend tens to hundreds of hours translating that image in paint. Through heightened framing and re-representation, subject turns into object. Decontextualized and materialized, the effect is physical and temporal closeness.

My painting, Through The Maelstrom, for example, began as a picture I took of my partner through a magnifying glass in an installation by the artist Philip Parreno. I first started painting this image because of its interesting surfaces—chrome frame, reflective glass, distorted swirl caused by a convex lens. Then, after weeks of painting, I realized it also contained my reflection at its center. What started out as a convoluted portrait of my partner ended up being a painting of me. I decided to title this painting after an Edgar Allan Poe short story in which a shipwrecked man survives a raging whirlpool by holding onto a round object, flowing with the torrential current rather than against it.

In another painting, Beast of England (Bulwark), you are faced with the stoic back of a four-foot-tall hairless cat. I originally met this cat during a trip to London. He was sitting at the edge of a couch staring out a window. Watching people and birds go by, it looked as though he was protecting the house we were in, his domain. Despite his puny one-foot stature, I imagined the cat fancied himself a regal guardian full of purpose. So, I painted him as large as a gargoyle. In George Owell’s novella, Animal Farm, a wise boar sings a song called Beasts of England to rally the other farm animals. The song spurs an uprising that leads to the tyrannical human owners’ overthrow and the animals’ freedom, at least temporarily. The painting is a nod to the cat’s autonomy; it is about my view of the cat and the cat’s utter disregard of that view. 

I strive to materialize viewpoints, either through an unusual vantage point, like a foreshortened computer screen, or in subject matter, such as a cat’s returned gaze. I use anamorphism, anthropomorphism, and representational painting techniques to stir introspection. Confronted with one of my paintings, you might first become more aware of your position relative to it materially, then to the depicted subject, and lastly, possibly, the person next to you.