Paintings 2014-2023
The image of the cutaway frame house I use in a number of my paintings developed from my experience rebuilding a small 19th century farmhouse. I began to see the cutaway house as a stage for quotidian narratives, exposing the internal structure of such humble buildings, both funny and poignant, a fragile stand in for the mundane. And I began to present the structure in the warped, decayed, termite-ridden state that I found it in, and objects in the dented, bent worn state they eventually assume, partly because it gave me the opportunity to explore rhythms I’ve always found interesting, and partly because it felt like an honest portrayal of the world as an entropic place. Sometimes I stray out to find a ghost ship or a lone chimney, but the sense of entropy remains the same.
Paintings 2012-2014
When I was working on this series I felt a tension between how I depicted or rendered recognizable objects and how I made them part of a more abstract space.
Rather than working from observation or preparatory drawings, I began instead by drawing with charcoal directly on the surface, establishing a sort of scaffold on which to "hang" the imagery. As certain bits-figures objects or abstract forms (that I felt had a likeness to actual objects) presented themselves, I began to develop some of them along with the overall structure.
I was interested in the process of memory, ie. which lines, as I was drawing, seemed to conjure objects and what part of my experience the objects/images referenced - cultural (film, art, cartoons) or daily gesture, or even gesture reinterpreted via a cultural mash up.
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The image of the cutaway frame house I use in a number of my paintings developed from my experience rebuilding a small 19th century farmhouse. I began to see the cutaway house as a stage for quotidian narratives, exposing the internal structure of such humble buildings, both funny and poignant, a fragile stand in for the mundane. And I began to present the structure in the warped, decayed, termite-ridden state that I found it in, and objects in the dented, bent worn state they eventually assume, partly because it gave me the opportunity to explore rhythms I’ve always found interesting, and partly because it felt like an honest portrayal of the world as an entropic place. Sometimes I stray out to find a ghost ship or a lone chimney, but the sense of entropy remains the same.
Paintings 2012-2014
When I was working on this series I felt a tension between how I depicted or rendered recognizable objects and how I made them part of a more abstract space.
Rather than working from observation or preparatory drawings, I began instead by drawing with charcoal directly on the surface, establishing a sort of scaffold on which to "hang" the imagery. As certain bits-figures objects or abstract forms (that I felt had a likeness to actual objects) presented themselves, I began to develop some of them along with the overall structure.
I was interested in the process of memory, ie. which lines, as I was drawing, seemed to conjure objects and what part of my experience the objects/images referenced - cultural (film, art, cartoons) or daily gesture, or even gesture reinterpreted via a cultural mash up.
4