Statement

My paintings are places and I approach them as such. As a painter, I turn my back to the external world and enter the world of the painting. I hope a viewer might do that too. When people say, “I want to go there” I feel I have hit the mark in some way.


Inspired by the geographic location and landscape I see daily, the images in my paintings are of observed and imagined places where one can be in relationship with others, the world, and the self. Made in a meticulous way, carefully composed, the paintings call attention to a tradition of craft and beauty that highlight actions of slowness and care. My use of scale, proportion, pattern and subtly shifting color are visual elements that create a slight perceptual and physical dislocation. Like bonsai, the places in my paintings are compact reductions of lived experience.


At first glance harmonious, but spatially impossible, there is comfort and unease in the scenes I depict — optimism and anxiety, acceptance and denial, critique and longing. By reframing reality, and suspending pleasure indefinitely, I suggest my desire for, and also the impossibility of such uninterrupted conditions.


Drawing from an art historical lineage that partially includes early American folk art, American Modernism, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, the sublime landscape paintings of the Hudson River School as well as contemporary romantic painters such as Peter Doig, Laura Owens, Karen Kilimnik, Ben Sledsens, Amy Lincoln, Ian Felice, Sophie Treppendahl, Mathew Wong, and Maureen Gallace, my paintings are permeable spaces and arenas of contemplation. They are places where many kinds of time overlap. Concrete and ephemeral. Phenomenon and mirage. Places at the intersection of time and timelessness. They are representations of daily life and manifestations of desire that idealize qualities of nature and the concept of home.