For the past several years I have reexamined my painting practice and my role as an artist. I am interested in uncertainty in the space that exists between abstraction and representation. These two concepts dominate the history of painting and you can ride the edge of either one like a wave. I want that slippage of one space to occupy the other. I don’t think painting should be clear as to what you are seeing; there should be a journey, a quest and a reward. If there is something in my approach to painting that can be reductive in what I do, it would be painting at human scale, making the process visible, letting the viewer account for the application of paint, see the layers and to experience the work in its entirety. I want paint to sit on the surface like modern art but I also want it to optically blend from a distance as when you look at a landscape, space opens up and push and pull occurs in the experience. Painting is a much-needed meditation in this world, a pulse check, a human connection to the physical world, a counterpoint to the digital age. How we encounter images, information, and facts on a daily basis is most likely to be digital, which extends the life of a painting but does not substitute it.
We rely increasingly more and more on information either stored or generated from technology to validate and inform our knowledge, opinion and place in the world. I see an opportunity to extend the meaning of painting through these platforms, to not only place paintings in the physical world but also in the digital realm, the realm of social media. I am interested in what counts as knowledge, perhaps in the Socratic sense but also how we discriminate and sort through the mountains of information we need to sift through.
Painting for me continues to be important because it is what I value. It encapsulates the human experience; it is sophisticated and contemplated; it is singular. A painting does not change- it changes you.