Artist's Statement

My practice draws heavily on the experience of observing the people, interiors, and landscapes that I find around me. The task of transfiguring my perceptions of the world into oil is deeply rewarding to me, and I see myself as a painter-translator, rendering the ineffable qualities of my life around me into paint. When I work from life, I am concerned not just with my motif, but with the way all of the paint fits together as a puzzle. The substance takes on a life of its own, the paint as a mud on the surface becoming greater than the sums of its parts. It is this balancing act, between faithfully rendering the motif and considering the paint beyond just the image, which motivates my continued working from observation. It is practicing pure presence with my subject, a meditation into the experience of being painter and painted. 

In the past two years however, my work has expanded into two predominant categories of equal importance: my more purely observational pieces, and my synthetic images.

I have begun drawing on my experiences of working from observation to create paintings that not only explore my personal memory and emotional landscape, but also explore a larger world outside of time which exists in our human cultural subconscious . These synthetic paintings are all unified in their purpose, to allow me to work through the feelings that arise within my individual experience, but to also harken to a collective human experience of life and emotion which I believe all people are able to access. This body of work ranges from more literal paintings of my memories, to a more sublime world of my imagination. Through these synthetic works, I oscillate between degrees of narrative realism, painting memories veridically as I remember them, memories as I feel them, and abstracted pure feelings told through a language of personal symbols. In my more straightforward memory-based pieces, I paint about my individual experiences in an attempt to memorialize a feeling or understand it, such as painting an argument between coworkers I was caught in between, or an eel-hunt charged with personal emotions towards my hunting partner. In my less literal works, I strive to create a mythology which is personal to me, but also taps into a rich lineage of archetypes and symbolic imagery that humans have used throughout recorded history. This synthetic branch of my work combines imagery from my sketchbooks, written journals, and research into the works of Jung and Eliade, as well as the human archaeological record which contains symbols and visual archetypes which repeat cross-culturally and cross-temporally.

As I paint this present-mythos, I lean on the symbols recognizable to any human being to convey my personal feelings, and connect to the viewer by way of this shared language.