Artist Statement

Using found objects, torn pages from discarded books, debris from the studio floor, oil paint, dry pigments, and adhesives, I build my paintings. The surfaces are scratched, torn, tattered, burned, and painted again and again, until a scarred whole emerges.

The paintings mark the passage of time: they are vessels of memory containing the traces of their past. The paintings explore the space between order and chaos, and the creation of place through memory and experience. I often use grids in my paintings to create a sense of order that is then eroded through the methodical applications of layered paint that call into question the authority of the once rigid structure (or I use the grid as a means to maintain an order in an expanded field of chaos.) Each new layer of paint creates a new juncture, a new surface, that erodes the primacy of the previous layer(s), causing the interactions of each added surface to create more complex interactions and never allowing any one layer to dominate. The material accumulation of painted layers creates an idealized, yet, fractured whole.

The paintings are meditations on our complex relationship with time, history and the construction of consciousness. I strive to capture in painting those poetic fragments that make up the essence of our transitory lives as it unfolds before us.