My art is the transmutation of mind energy into physical form. The mind’s ability to deliver new thoughts of insight, intuition, and creative inventiveness has never ceased to amaze me. I am fascinated with those moments of inspiration that hit me like a lightning bolt. This is at the core of why I create. My art is a culminated journey and manifestation of a personal, visual language. The ephemeral nature of ideas is what keeps me in constant motion, sketching, experimenting, playing with ambiguities and blobby squiggles of paint.

My paintings are about my relationship to the world: they are cerebral and physical, intellectual and visceral. The disaster motif is a metaphor I use to discuss personal, sociopolitical, environmental, and ideological issues. Through the motif, I explore the existential self and examine personal narratives, some of them literal and others enigmatic. Notions of loss, place, memory, space, and time are central to my examination of personal experiences from my past and present. The imagery is in constant flux, but always returns to a pile-up. A pile-up is everything and it is nothing.

Through painting I explore the empirical nature of knowledge, inscribed through and by the body. I use abstraction to break down distinctions between system and intuition, space and light, abjection and desire. I am drawn to abstraction because of its ability to slip into surrounding territories of figuration and spatial illusion. In these painting modalities I seek to create a tension between the materiality of painting and the image. When a stain becomes a trompe l’oeil shadow, or drips become hard–edge vibrations, the painting arrives at a threshold.

This series focuses on the facades of big-box and strip-mall stores in suburban Chicago. This type of building not only populates the landscape but is also an integral part of the larger culture of consumerism in which we live. I find these mundane spaces visually appealing due to the architecture, the quality of light, and the arrangement of design elements that emphasize the abstraction of the subject. Viewing the scene from the front creates straight horizontal lines and vertical lines that form geometric shapes within the space, reflecting the flat nature of the picture plane.

Cities are fascinating creatures to me. The work and organization involved in a city’s creation and evolution, the constant shifting and adaption . . . I’ve been watching cities of sorts (some are perhaps just towns or hamlets, or even a block party) evolve in my paintings for some time now. My cities are shaped by everyday observations; cause and effect; a nonlinear narrative; composition and movement; sleep deprivation; and at times, a desire to see large groups work together toward making something bigger than themselves individually. Though my townsfolk have

This most recent work is an extension of a concentrated focus on mediated images depicting moments before or after disasters. They are mixed media paintings on duralar that compress visual information of the construction and deconstruction of homes placed upon a shake table. These images show promise and prevention in feats of engineering; they suggest hope in the guise of destruction.

My “material cannibalism” heads/non-heads are paintings that form themselves: just add water, fluffed with a fork. Or, mustached entities speckled with fuzzy external greasethick brains, huge facial scabs, bulging eyeball-like masses, various bumps, lumps, and skids, gaping holes forming and deforming with mysterious pockets of vaporous nothingness. They are decapitated hermaphroditic frog-things drowned in pharmaceutical drenched bacteria-free pond scum and radioactive toxic schlock. They are three-tongued flies nesting in the hollowed-out eye sockets of a once-swollen, now blown-out

After several viewings of Wall-E and a couple of Discovery Channel programs, I consider myself an informed amateur on the speculative pseudoscience of the future. According to the near-facts told to me by the cable television, it is thought that it would take less than five hundred years for an uninhabited Earth to erase all visible traces of humankind. I am interested in our individual attempts to stabilize an environment that is in constant flux, and I aim to create in my paintings a strange and wonderful world in which we are foolishly powerless against our surroundings.

ur modern society, like never before, is bombarded by media images focused on celebrity and obsessed with wealth and luxury. Tempted by the glow of the spotlight, and seduced by its excesses, the message seems to be that our problems and those of our world can be solved simply by shopping. Against a backdrop of impending pandemic threats, world-wide political and religious warfare and climatic upheaval, self-centered displays of physical vanity and selfish, aggrandizing behaviors have become a vogue; and bankable means of defining our selves and by extension, our cultural persona.