Artist Statement

I am interested in storybook simplicity and the handling of darkness and complexity within children's stories.  And a constant preoccupation is what I call 'original innocence,' or universal vulnerability. Whether a portrait subject looking out at the viewer, forever vulnerable to projection, prejudice or indifference, or two symbolic and elemental predator and prey animals circling each other forever on the canvas, the sense of vulnerability through encounter with a seeming other is fundamental.

My paintings would rather err on the side of clumsy or naked than be too refined - it is important that the first energy is preserved.  I try to paint with more than just the small mind of distinctions.  The same impulse is seen in the simple means that I use:  just paint on rectangular surfaces, nothing fancy; in my occasional sound and video recordings, I use the the most humble, one-button recorders, unstaged real-life sets, and minimal editing. Things that a child could use.

Yet I use oil paint, a medium of long and refined tradition, not a child’s medium.  

I like this contradiction, for it points to the comedy of painting and of representation. Dot, dot, dash - it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a sky, it’s an eye. You can’t help but smile. And then to laugh at the idea of painting being simple or elemental.  …“Start from the beginning”?  A likely story!  I know that I stand on the shoulders of a hundred generations of artists, even if I sometimes pretend that I don’t.