Paint Box Theater
When I first posed a model to represent a friend, who had died some years before, I had an epiphany. As the work came into resolution, a disquieting but not unpleasant sensation overcame me; it was as if I had been able to call the spirit of that person into my studio, to be together again.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but it did suggest that there was something significant to be gained by utilizing the images of people I knew and cared about. Later, I realized that I had chanced upon what Leone Battista Alberti called painting’s fundamental magic: to call forth those who are absent, to bring them into the light, to give them the semblance of a living presence. The painter as shaman, as a keeper of memory.
As I work, I am guided and inspired by this elegiac impulse through the sensations and feelings that emerge. Each painting becomes a reflecting pool in which I recast emotional states and stories about people. What possesses me is the existential drama of the shifting self and others, the unspoken thoughts and sensations that create a sense of our paradoxical individuality. People are more like events than facts, I am more interested in "human events" than exterior nature. I seek to use the particularities of individuals, especially in large complex paintings, to stand as symbols in urban icons of everyday reality. I hope to evoke the ambiguities with which we shape our sense of the world, and indeed, ourselves. For me, certain of these scenes have not been comfortable to look upon, let alone paint.
An event or dilemma in a person's life has often been the initial point of departure. To the extent it is possible, I empathize with those I paint, in order to express them better, recognizing that they may also be emanations of myself. Some images define scenes that have evolved into metaphors of larger social realities. In this way, painting is a way of thinking, of coming to know what I truly feel. And so I have come to see my larger project as an exploration of the tragicomic theater of life, a concept that stretches back to Plato and Plotinus.
As reactionary forces are undermining democracies here and abroad, I have focused as a painter on the victims of neglect and injustice. Art is not solely about art, or self-expression, rather it is a meditation on life as it is lived. The role I can play in society is to elicit empathy over indifference; to bear witness. Any assessment of the grim realities of our modern world must appeal to our survival instinct, as we experience a gradual loss of our freedoms. To abstract the pain of contemporary history and give it a valid pictorial cri de coeur is my aim.