Statement

Imagination is a fundamental ingredient to being human. Its role in painting is significant, as painting requires a swift, psychological shift to turn ideas into physical matter. For me painting is an adventure in storytelling, albeit an idiosyncratic one, and one that never gets old. When I paint I imagine the forms I use to possess distinct personalities that, in turn, become tools for working. I create narratives for which outcomes can only be reached by slogging through forests of possibilities — some of these pursued, many abandoned, and most a failure. I interweave observations and current events of various scales into my process so that each painting encapsulates a specific moment in my life, and at times I incorporate parts of older paintings into new work, as they serve as a baseline memory. The paintings evolve element by element, an exciting challenge.

A better statement

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

-William Faulkner