STATEMENT OF WORK

I make paintings that aim to capture, visually and conceptually, the complex interplay between past and present. We find ourselves in a time marked by fragmentation and uncertainty. Structures from the past inform our present but fail to show a clear path forward. Anything can be art, but Western meta-narratives of painting that once gave the tradition coherence—art as portals to the divine, as imitations of appearances, or as steps in the teleological progression toward abstraction and optical purity—have broken down. 

My paintings are sites of demolition and construction where objects of the past and subjects of the present meet to build new coherent spaces from the fragments that surround us. My recent paintings are still lifes, of a sort. They depict handmade gold mirrors and the spaces these mirrors reflect, combining diverse historical materials and representational techniques. I make the mirrors using an ancient gilding technique called verre églomisé, which creates a mirrored surface by affixing gold leaf to glass. The squares of gold leaf wrinkle and break as I apply them, creating a fragmented mirrored grid. I further fragment the mirror by etching an image from an art historical source into the reflective surface: a house under construction, a throne of a Byzantine Madonna, the building from Fra Angelico’s Annunciation of Cortona. Installed on my studio wall, each etched mirror reflects its surroundings while maintaining a composition of its own, filtering my present surroundings––sometimes even my reflection––through images from the past. 

The gilded mirrors are complex subjects to paint from life. Their interplay of mirrored gold leaf, etched image, reflected studio space, transparent glass, cast shadows, and opaque white wall highlights the instability of vision and the role the mind plays in constructing a coherent view. My painting process mirrors this instability of vision, alternating between addition and subtraction by layering rabbit skin glue gesso, egg tempera, oil paint, and alkyds to create coherent yet multiple spaces. Sometimes the physical paint dominates, sometimes the art historical reference image, sometimes the reflected space of my studio—even the gallery space in which the viewer encounters the painting is reflected in the gloss of the painted surface. The result is a realism wherein the reality depicted is a complex construction of tradition, art object, and the viewer’s present experience of looking.