Artist Statement

I find beauty in all the wrong places. In my paintings, a cigarette butt with fuchsia lipstick kiss prints, or a soiled gingham tablecloth, can function simultaneously as holy icon and ironic joke. In the work that I do, I aspire to create the paradoxical, awkward, and enigmatic quality of heartfelt poetry on a graffitied bathroom wall. Unwittingly sitting there, gazing at the words scrawled through random layers of crude, and sometimes, elegant visual meanderings, an epiphany overtakes me. For an instant, I see the world as it really is: gorgeous in contradiction and absurdity, funny in generic blather, and authentic in poignant longing.

Of course, my conception of validity and splendor is entirely subjective, based on my suburban upbringing, my sense of humor, and my own tunnel-vision rebellion. Although I prefer to hint at my opinions rather than dictate, to tease rather than to rant, I intend my paintings to be provocative statements to challenge conceptions of beauty, value, and truth.

As I work, my paintings constantly generate new questions for me, and, as discoveries are made and truths revealed, more questions arise, invalidating earlier judgments. I allow myself to playfully harvest imagery from bourgeois forms of adornment: wallpaper, textiles, tattoos, and graffiti, allowing narratives to organically evolve. Whether heightened metaphor or harebrained anecdote, I craft my visual narratives with the cheapest, tackiest, and silliest ornamental nothings I can find, partly because I believe these ideas are culturally biased and, in part, because they are my birthright.

The formal questions that torture and delight me center on the unique range of marks the viscous media of paint affords me, and the awkward juxtaposition of linear drawing with it. I work in layer after layer, building up a surface, erasing past verdicts, and then looking back on buried decisions with nostalgia. Unselfconscious and hastily made marks intrigue me the most, but must compete with contrasting ordered systems for an argument to be raised on the canvas.

What do I want? Who do I love? How much is too much? How much can I stand to lose? The universal questions, for me, are the most personal, and, the more bewildering the answers to these questions, the more gratifying the search.