Paintings
I’ve enjoyed drawing for as long as I can remember and occasionally dabbled in painting, but it wasn’t until the disruption and isolation of the pandemic years of COVID-19 that I first embraced it as a practice. My journey began with a large (for me) acrylic, on a 25” x 24” canvas: a cryptically homoerotic still life based on a staged photograph I took in my apartment of cheekily altered gym shorts, held aloft in front of a white wall from just off frame.
Feeling emboldened and inspired with the completion of my first painting, I determined to embark on a new challenge, exploring the unfamiliar medium of oils, starting with a series of 12” x 12” canvases.
With no formal training in oil painting, I strive to approach each canvas with a Beginner’s Mind, allowing my curiosity and intuition to guide me. This lack of technical constraint gives me a sense of freedom to experiment and find my own way; I embrace the evidence of this search, and the warp from my hand’s translation of the source image to the canvas. Rather than striving for total realism, I believe these distortions reflect my subjectivity—expressively echoing the nature of memory itself.
My paintings are deeply personal, drawn from the visual archive of my life—typically cropped from my own photographs. These moments include me and my partner at a gay bar in Silverlake, years before we started dating; my beloved Shih Tzu, Olive; the two of them walking down a Brooklyn street; a pair of startled deer caught in the headlights on a country road near my childhood Indiana home; a revelatory first encounter with the sublime fast-food culture of Southern California. Each piece holds a memory, filtered through my perspective, and rendered in paint.
