I am interested in exploring the empathetic potential of my perception through the act of creating art objects. I seek out the motif in my own environment and work from it directly, in order to allow myself to have a more immersive experience, one that allows me to engage in the open ended act of asking questions.

Asking questions is my primary mode of working. Throughout the act of making, I ask a wide range of questions, some of which are about the practical concerns I am facing, the materials I am using, the abstract design of my picture; but as I work, these questions give way to larger concerns. What does it mean to be here, to be looking, to be painting? What does it mean to be present? What does it mean to be alive? I make no claim to have answers, but I believe that in the act of asking, I am able to obliquely access some form of universal truth.

Through this process of posing questions and striving to be present, I work to imbue my pictures with the evidence of my own personal concerns. I strive to reveal the interior life of the motif. I explore the potential of place for emotive resonance. I incorporate the grand history of art making (as understood through the lens of my own aesthetic ambitions), using it as a precedent, encouragement, teacher and exemplar. 

It is my belief that when I do these things  successfully, I am able to make work that contains a record of the act of seeing, as well as the things seen; a trace of the universality of all human experience, as well as the specificity of my own personal experience. My belief (enforced by my own experience of truly great art) is that while art is a physical object, it has the ability to possess a transient, ephemeral life that transcends the parameters of the material and physical world.

As Edwin Dickinson once said, the purpose of art is to “move the spirit through the eye.” My work is an attempt to continue in that vein, with hopes of moving the spirits of others through the act of creating honest, humble, and hard won images.