Painting is a powerful, surprising exploration.
My work is about human expression and the human experience. I’ve painted a lot of faces cropped close up. Generally, don’t know the person I am painting, but rather, I am working from a photo I have taken in a crowd. The subject is captured in a private moment with a true expression, and not a staged portrait. Through the oil painting process, that human moment is presented. The experience is the subject of the painting.
The paintings I create of my simplified “skinny guys” are also about the human experience. Their uniformity and generic appearance reveals an individuality of each figure upon a further look. Even thought they are cold, mysterious, and separated, they maintain some level of humanity.
I’m playing with human depiction in a primitive form. I make a couple of dots for eye, a dot for the nose, and a body with no arms. The image is just a shorthand for a figure. It’s my personal iconography. By increasing the level of depiction, the figures enter the uncanny valley and become creepy and live somewhere in that “not quite human” land. Some paintings use broad brushstrokes while other become more rendered.