Paintings 2014-2018
 
I am a painter who was trained as a sculptor. Form and volume have always been important to me and so the treatment of objects in my paintings and drawings which are, for the most part rendered from memory, emphasizes a tactile physicality rather than the play of light on surfaces, what things are and feel like rather than merely what they look like. I often choose imagery that feels iconic, a bellows camera instead of an single lens reflex, a typewriter instead of a printer, wood grain instead of vinyl, emblematic parts of our received history. With a nod to the energetic distortions and color of mid 20thcentury cartoons, the recent Little House series is a kind of mad regionalism of tumble down frame houses cutaway like little stages or the architecture in early renaissance painting .They are always too small for their inhabitants and frame a narrative of metaphorical and physical confinement, but in a bright comic package that is the stuff of daily life and a sly critique of the American Dream. 

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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. The sometimes giddy imagery might have seemed to undercut this ambition, but in a way that was the point. How clearly could the space be described or structured even if it were everyday gestures, a Mary Jane shoe, the slouch of a 1950's model, or a cartoon version of an African mask by way of Brancusi's Newborn. In fact, how clearly could her slouch be described as that clearly structured space, or anyway part of it. I didn't want it to just be a picture of things.

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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