There is a loop, from art to commercial design to public consumption and back, within which my work floats. I take part in this food chain as an end-user, like most people, walking down the street seeing a Nike ad or a crushed box of Chinese rice snacks crumpled on the pavement, its bright oranges and greens bleating out through the dirt ground into it. My painting is a synthesis of abstraction, art history, personal iconography, biomorphism, and the influence of color and design from pop sources such as packaging, cars, signage, shoes; all kinds of things from the everyday commercial visual environment.
One of the main dichotomies within this forest of influences that I remain fascinated with is that between the flat bright come-on color of commercial appeal, and a mode of image making which was the special provenance of oil painting since the Renaissance--the depiction of the shiny or juicy or tasty object of desire. This sense of the appealing object, the lure of the luscious skin of things, travels through art history in the paintings of artists like Van Eyck, Velazquez, Rubens and Manet etc. Rich furs and shiny beads, water droplets on an earthen jug, the flesh of a horse’s flank or peaches in a bowl--the world of sensual material appeal was primary to painting, as it is now to advertising.
Painting, with its slow manual process, is a way to create surprise and personal meaning from an interaction with influences from both my inner and outer life. I’m not interested in undermining pop commercial sources systemically but rather in re-routing them. My practice involves ingesting and eventually disgorging these influences entwined in a language of painting and abstraction. For everyone, every day is a battle between the inside and outside, the outcome is always a synthesis. In a larger sense, painting restates this in a way that makes it visible. and because of that it can become both personal and communal.
My work is populated by objects of desire and doubt which resemble many things in the world but have in common a morphological pressure; the feeling that they have grown to fit the shape of the hunger or the idea that created them and wishes to receive them. I gravitate towards a kind of anthropomorphic humor, a slightly embarrassed dignity, a subtle leer. I want to create objects that have a living quality, things that not just stain but breathe in the memory.