Artist Statement
My paintings illustrate the natural habitat as I have photographed it in the Greater Los Angeles region of California. The canvases are marked with elements of architecture and urbanization that indicate frames or boundaries for these oil paintings of the sky. By serially depicting this imagery I seek to convey a sense of the permanence of the change in our world that has been scaffolded by our collective actions and policies.
The type of images of sunsets and sunrises in these paintings is familiar to most people, and especially so to those with access to social media, where we share photos of mornings and evenings in far-flung places endlessly. With that in mind there is nothing extraordinary or singular in any such representation, unless it is in the affirmation of a wildly common thread of humanness that the daily events inspire. Perhaps there is something intrinsically moving in the infinitely varied cycle that plays out in the atmosphere and in our apprehension of it.
It is the apprehension of our contextual world that I seek to address with these paintings. In documenting these images I employ a technique that suggests that the shortest distance between two points (your pupil and mine) is best bridged by an economy of brush strokes. In doing so I acknowledge the conceit that the camera eye is objective and therefore able to be readily and widely appropriated. An event does not become history except by its entry into the public record and even then it is not useful unless it is read and interpreted. It may be that in this changeable, ephemeral and esoteric world a document is the most egalitarian agent of faith in humanity that we own.
Artist Background
New York Academy of Art
Master of Fine Arts, 1997
Brown University
Bachelor of Arts, 1993