In many ways, the act of painting is metaphoric for the experience of memory. Time passes between the experience of things and the recollection of experience that occurs hours, days, or even years later. Similarly, the conception of a painting is often so altered by the painting of a painting that it may only retain a residual stain of that initial inkling. I hope that through the process of their making, my paintings come to embody a provocation of the animate and the visceral. Painting feels in some ways like an excavation : peeling back the layers of subjective experience to extract its most salient features. Often these features, worthy of remembrance, are passed over in my conscious mind, and it is not until they find their way into the imagery that I begin to recall the lastingness of their impressions.

The people in my paintings reside in a world that feels dreamy and elusive. They manifest the whimsy and obscurity of the unconscious. They are both fascinated and repelled by their own humanity and by the fecundity of the worlds around them. This sensation is of a type of awakening: the poignancy of becoming aware of our constant loss of things to the past, or of losing things because of personal negligence.

I think of the figures in this way as exposing moments of honesty within the paintings. I think the type of honesty that they exhibit is often publicly unsolicited by privately familiar to most of us. Our vanity and our insecurities concerning the body often make us think of it as a personal pawn and its actions and its betrayal of us can sometimes be surprising and unsettling. We mistrust it and so it behaves in ways that we are ashamed of or do not condone; it appears in ways that we think are unflattering and it can be a constant, nasty, goad. It is also vulnerable, weak, and does not last forever. Even knowing this, we will still either overlook or adore people by way of it.

The body is of interest because it is changed by the passing of time and by experience: not only does it become a vessel of stories, but it also wears its own history. Because of the unassailable nature of this fact, the body, especially the naked or vulnerable body, can function as the ultimate truth-teller. Our bodies are essential and they confirm the common ground of being human, but they are also disparate at the same time; we each occupy one and yet each is a receptacle of a lifetime of experiences that change it and mold it in a very singular manner. And each body may and probably does eventually defy the postures set out to reform it to any one axiom: youth is not always beauty; old age not necessarily decrepitude; extreme ugliness or exceptional beauty may not lead to dereliction.

Sensation within the paintings, because it is the way in which we understand our world, is very important to me. I try to allude to the senses of touch, movement, sight, and smell within the images. Also, there is often a dislocation between concrete sensual cues within the imagery and something that seems to be more private and exclusively conjured, remembered, or imagined by the figures. The viewer is a privy witness to these events and hopefully is made more self-aware through the viewing of images that embody both halves of what makes us human, our physicality, and also our cerebralness.

The imagery and the feelings associated with these types of events make me want to paint. I am interested in exploring the conscious part of our existence which prompts us to remember, reflect, and engage in reverie. When I paint, I like to think about why we dream, what we dream of, and how this ability to simultaneously imagine and reflect connects and threads together a type of strange and cumulative knowledge of ourselves.