STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings make use of diverse visual strategies in an effort to understand how painting, not subject, style, or image, is a unique and specific carrier of meaning. Consistent throughout my work is an emphasis on a highly developed, tactile surface (which I create through many different kinds of paint and paint application) and I seek to make paintings that cannot be easily understood through photographs or reproduction in an effort to make the viewer seek out the singular object that is the work.  Rooted in familiar themes from the medium’s history my paintings may be still lives, figures, landscapes, abstractions or other combinations of these. When I begin a painting, I start with a basic prompt and this prompt is similar to a “MacGuffin” (a MacGuffin being defined as an object, device, or event in fiction that is necessary to a plot but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself). While the initial subjects or ideas behind my works are personally meaningful to me they are also rooted in the everyday and may be simply factual. When they become part of my paintings the inherent physicality of painting takes root and begins to mutate my initial intentions and meanings turning the everyday into the fantastical and the familiar and factual into the fictional; this, I believe, is the manner in which painting is a unique carrier of meaning. All paintings are inherent fictions (which gives them an inherent newness) and they become so by transforming subjects, ideas and meanings (whether factual or not) through materiality with activity within historical and contemporary contexts. I am interested in the subtle, indescribable properties that make paintings specific—their “thisness” or hacceities as the philosopher and friar Duns Scotus came to define them. It is for this reason that I make and seek a variety in my own artistic output; it helps me further understand these indescribable qualities and the mystery that painting presents to me in that I look for harmony amongst works despite their apparent visual difference. A painting is fundamentally mystifying upon its conclusion; rarely do I know what a single work is “about”. I am aware of how my paintings came to be yet I do not fully understand them. Not places to confirm answers; I hope my paintings are appeals to look deeply and openly.