I think of my work first and foremost as an aesthetic phenomenon, rather than as a social/political one. I sometimes work with imagery that draws on the politics of the personal, but I attempt to keep the aesthetic value and imaginative power of the work at or near the center of any discussion about it – I don’t want the issues in my work to collapse into just social and political concerns. I try to make work that is both meditative and challenging, that operates in complex ways on formal, visual and conceptual levels, and I do this by situating myself, and my sometimes non-traditional subjects, at the heart of painting tradition.

Conceptually and process-wise, I am indebted to the Surrealists, as well as to the media-saturated culture we live in. I use a collage-like process as the primary method for creating compositions and narrative and psychological content. I’m interested less in "realism" per se than in the tension between heightened tangibility and narrative ambiguity. In fact, I am not really interested in realism at all.

My source images are photographs found in magazines, on the Internet, and in my digital camera. I also incorporate still lifes, which I paint from life. The large paintings are assembled from various small pieces of visual information – a hand from a photo I took here, and an apple I painted from life there. The portraits and spaces I paint are often composites, often built on spatial and conceptual paradox.

My current body of work grew out of a series of self-portraits (including the painting, Stetson, 2007, and the video, Closet, 2007). Some of the pieces still allude to the subject of identity and its construction, but I think I am moving further away from that and towards a meditation on human relationship and alienation.

Updated November 19th, 2008