I hope to document the most powerful living force on earth—humankind—by painting its derelict superstructures. These stricken, decaying ships and power plants, former symbols of manmade beauty, pleasure, and power, were constructed during a period in recent history when technology and design were still united.

My works are often made from materials I collect outdoors, usually while I’m out walking.

My recent paintings simultaneously comment on a number of subjects, such as art history, culture, and excess, while critiquing (and indulging) my own naïve, self-centered ego. The paintings are linked through their visual armature, on which I create narratives whose space is as much a character as the figures. The space informs the psychological tenor of the work and contains certain attributes, which indicate the characteristics of the figures’ identity and story.

A few months ago I was with a friend in a grocery store. She stopped and said, “Well, that’s odd.” I wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out...but there it was: a loaf of bread sitting on the floor in the middle of the aisle in a sea of linoleum, not a person in sight. There was something about it—this quiet wrongness. Not so wrong it called attention to itself...just wrong enough to make me look around the room for what else I might have overlooked, to wonder what had just happened, or what might happen next.

This is the perfect painting. This is a painting. How does it construct space? Why does it construct space? Scrutinize its surface, smooth and flat. How was it made? Why was it made? Look at the perfect painting. Edge, ground, shadow, object, color—look at how the shadow falls. Falls on the color. Falls again on the ground. How does the shadow fall? Like this. What does it mean? The other day I saw a water glass shatter on the floor, and images of disasters danced with unattainable objects. Someday I hope to understand this.

Since 2005 I have been reworking a kidney-shaped form derived from a horse’s tail. At times, influenced by the concept of a Klein bottle, I double the tail/kidney to produce a surface with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” sides, impossible to orient. This allows me to explore the spatial relationships, both metaphorical and formal, between empty and full spaces. In my recent paintings, I double and triple and quadruple the tail/kidney shapes; now resembling looping flower petal forms, I use them as building blocks to construct a sort of portrait.

I am fascinated with people, relationships, and mass psychology. In particular, I am interested in how the mind works and how our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and perceptions create our world, both personally and collectively. I find inspiration for my work by looking both outward and inward. From these explorations I have developed a cast of characters who are at times scary and peculiar and at other times funny and vulnerable. I usually render them with a repetition of pattern that gives them a feeling of form and solidity while maintaining their dynamism.

These paintings are part of the larger installation Views from After the Horizon, which explores the paradoxes that arise from imagining the world without a human observer. However, while the images may refer to an end of man, I do not think of them as post-apocalyptic, and they do not include any evidence or residue of violence. They also have none of the references to a specific place or time that are prerequisite for an apocalyptic event horizon. Rather, the horizon I deal with is the illusory and imagined line between the observer and the perceived.

My paintings are generated from automatic drawings and torn collages whose shapes, made from drawn lines or torn edges, reference figurative and abstract characters that are products of my unconscious and my responses to art history. I subvert the directness of the automatic drawings and collages chosen for their formal and psychic qualities by transferring them into the language of realism. This creates an illusion of transparent directness that is, paradoxically, achieved through a careful process of reproduction.

I put physical objects to abstract use in visual poems, painting with toss-away materials that contain and substitute for pigment. Within what initially is thought of as disposable, the pigment fleetingly appears.