Lately, I have been painting portraits of palm trees. To be specific, the sixteen most cold-hardy species of palm, as they are the most likely to survive the winters of Missouri, where I live. Each painting’s palette corresponds to the colors printed in the spreads of women’s clothing catalogs that have been delivered to my home, addressed to my wife.

This work explores the idea of monomania: an inordinate or obsessive interest in a single thing, idea, or subject. The multiplication of objects throughout the composition and from painting to painting references the speed and ease with which one can reproduce identical images in Photoshop. I am interested in performing software operations in the traditional medium of painting. I am inspired by drag-and-drop gestures in digital technology, the picture-within-a-picture found in FaceTime, iPhone homescreen images, and desktop arrangements on

These domestic interiors, populated by small groups of uniformed conspirators, provide an arena in which I explore the arc of western pictorial form and thought. Their narrative is both literary and technical as the human activity depicted interacts with formal and material considerations. In addition to creating light and space, color provides an essential counterpoint to drawing as I balance carefully rendered passages with a direct application of paint in order to create tension between surface quality and illusionistic depth.

Lately, I have been thinking of paintings as a framing device for the filtering and flattening of references. Painting, snowflakes, cruisin’, artifice, Dave Hickey, abstraction, Vegas, ZZ Top, the beginning or end, artificial intelligence, progress, the gesture, tropical vacations, bad taste, being serious, sunsets, escapism, “the ideal,” bifocal lenses, tanning salons, beauty, early ‘80s American punk rock, oil, palm trees, after midnight, the singularity, are all things that keep coming up in the paintings.