Creating Oil Paintings is a Powerful, Surprising Exploration.

I love the physical process of applying paint to the canvas. Slathering paint on with a palette knife, creating washes, putting glazes over sections, and painting quickly allows me to keep the process engaged and active. The act of painting through various techniques, styles, and materials provides me the possibility of creating an art object beyond my initial conception. I want my painting instincts to take over, allowing a painting to takes its own direction. Being surprised by the art is a great experience as a painter.

Faces and figures have always been a big part of my imagery. From the doodles in a sketchbook to large oil paintings, faces are the first thing I feel compelled to create whenever I pick up a drawing tool. In responding to the basic impulse to render the human image, my art feels honest to me. The faces I paint come from photos I take of crowd scenes, found photos, and my imagination. I usually paint with a simple composition and a limited palette of color, and I choose familiar, recurring imagery. When I paint, I don’t worry about saying something specific, but my painting say something for themselves.

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