Artist statement


I use painting to pay attention to places and situations which strike me as significant, but whose meaning is yet to be made clear. Much of the time, my attention is drawn to the built environment and the many ways in which nature has been delineated, ground up, and reconfigured to make way for a more manageable world in which people can coordinate their lives within fixed parameters. My paintings invariably get ensnared in the same tension between the natural and the normative. As the hardened record of past activity, the paintings reflect the individuality and idiosyncrasy of my own sensibility and agency. Yet, at the same time, the paintings also bear an index to the generic, the repeatable, and the predictable through their use of architectural structures and geometric forms. For me, part of the power of painting lies in its ability to navigate this border between personal meaning and public order.

 
 


Most of my paintings have a photographic source whose decomposition is a necessary byproduct of the painting’s composition. Rather than drawing or painting from life, I am in effect working from a document that serves as a record of what I have observed. The record introduces a mediating distance which allows my subject matter to be transformed through multiple stages of drawing, painting, and sometimes printmaking. The resulting compositions are interfaces between what I have seen and what I imagine and remember myself having seen. If impressionism is concerned with capturing a visual impression at the moment of its occurrence, then my project can be called a form of anti-impressionism or unimpressionism. Its object of inquiry is not the impression, but the afterlife of the impression as the initial imprint of observation wanes and gives way to visions of alternative modes of being in the world.