Artist Statement

My subject is how it feels to be alive right now. Not a private diary; a live report. I meet fear, anxiety and overwhelm as old friends. They have endless things to say to me and to each other, articulating with the panache of cartoon characters. Thereby, the difficult stays legible instead of paralyzing. Color emerges out of darkness or darkness scaffolds it. Darkness enchants me with its many tongues. I don't treat it as something to resolve. These paintings don't look back at a feeling, they're inside one. Now.

Curators who have spent real time in front of the work keep landing on the same register: urgency. The raw emotional content. The improvisational quality. The sense that nothing here has been settled in advance. These paintings are physically demanding to make, and I don't expect them to be comfortable to stand in front of either. The viewer's body is implicated the same way mine is when I'm working. That's not an accident of temperament. It's the point.

I approach a surface with a somatically; I give my body over to its whim and energy. What results is a physical negotiation between me and the material: dense color, vigorous brushstroke, the charged mark of oil pastel, animated crayon scribble, cerebral pencil line. Figures surface out of the abstraction and retreat back into it. I never resolve them into likeness. I confer with surface and material without a plan or a conclusion in mind. The exchange is frustrating and unpredictable. It produces solutions I could never have commandeered on my own.

Painting, oil pastel, and works on paper aren't three separate practices for me. They're one language moving through different resistances, and each keeps the others honest. Shown together, the range has been read back to me as maximalist and cohesive, complementary, not diluted.

This is gestural abstraction. But not seen through the lineage of a handful of men. What I am claiming is the validity of interiority from inside an unsettled body. The pressure of evidencing it is my strength.