Good fiction, while by definition “untrue,” nevertheless elicits human empathy due to its emotional believability.  My work strives for this quality while maintaining a stubbornly artificial appearance.  I liken it to the stylization and exaggeration found in theater or silent film. 

My current work owes a great deal to a series of landscape paintings I began almost a decade ago in which a forest functioned as a metaphor for several exasperating realities simultaneously: the failure to communicate and connect with people, my increasing belief in art’s ineffectual engagement with the spiritual, and a vague feeling of dread concerning environmental degradation.  So, forests were always sets with trees acting as props, but the attempt then was never to construct a complete allegory but rather a container for my own incomplete thoughts, frustrations, and inspirations.

While much of the forest imagery has fallen away, other props have enabled me to expand my visual language and continue producing absurdist vignettes.  Blunt symbols of inaccessibility such as fences and walls are mixed with others denoting endless space such as clouds, and still others implying the illusion of that space—mirrors. These elements are never particular but iconic. Graphic form, found serial imagery culled from collage sources, and a limited, high-contrast palette are all used to both simplify and emphasize the artificial, even cartoon-ish, quality of the images.  At the same time accumulation of line and pattern deny that simplification, creating retinal discomfort and often obliterating the distinction between figure and ground. 

The resulting destabilization of picture space sets the stage for a ripe blend of melodrama and dark comedy, where figuration and abstraction vie for the upper hand and optical illusion gains emotional resonance.  These works aim to reinvigorate certain visual tropes in the service of investigating what a spiritual quest for meaning might look like in a thoroughly contemporary idiom.