I build my paintings with party favors, discarded clothing, sequins, silk flowers, human hair, chicken bones, and whatever else I can get my hands on. I collect these objects and obsessively stitch them together into jam-packed assemblages that hang from the wall. I then coat the constructions with tinted resin, syrup, and plastic, allowing these materials to transform the paintings. Through this slow process of accumulation I create pieces that exist somewhere between painting, drawing, and sculpture.

I’m picking up where the California Raisins left off.

For the past few years, I have been making abstract paintings that I build by layering hand-drawn patterns within the boundaries of the canvas. The imperfections that result from handmade patterns and geometric forms often heighten their optical effects and make the viewer aware of the experience of looking. In these images I want to convey at once a sense of ambiguity, purposefulness, and humor. At times they have a sense of openness on one hand and resistance on the other: I am interested in what happens in the middle.

Departing from any subject matter that can be construed as an image or even an abstracted image, my principal interest is to explore the formal transactions within the picture plane to make an abstract painting. Questions about the idea of a painting as a window and a wall, the flat support, labor, and the connection between form and content are raised by the use of simple maneuvers in the application of pigment, the use of limited palette, and the repetition of forms.

My current body of work is an intense exploration of the concept, establishment, and power of the “ideal” through the historical inventions of Minimalism, utopia, perspective, printmaking, and drawing. There is an important commonality between these innovations that guides my thought process: the pursuit of idealism through concise order or law, which structures behaviors of expression, culture, social hierarchy, media, and history.

I read the Thrifty Nickel front to back, religiously. I seem to pick one up every time I see one. I love to find the advertisements that have lost their meaning, either by leaving out words or using too many initials or acronyms. Sentences are simplified into a jargon and by doing this, they make little sense. The kink in this communication is where I find a muse. My imagination runs wild when I read “42 pipe take all or none best offer.” Is it 42 pipes? Is it 42 inches? Should I offer two thousand dollars or fifty?

In my approach to image making, there is a symbiotic relationship between the intuitive and the analytic. Working with systems extracted from science and nature gives me an objective point of entry. Each piece is a variation of this approach: distilling drawing to its elementary parts and having a systematic working method allows me continual discovery and new challenges. I assert my free will. I move materials in space and time, leaving behind a material trace of my intention and the final image as evidence of discovery.

This body of work examines the culture of blue-collar, middle-class individuals returning to the hometowns and neighborhoods that they originally attempted to escape. Each portrait reveals the connect and disconnect between suburban landscapes and their residents, while also presenting questions such as What has my life become? and What will everyone think of me now?

Systems occur in nature, civilizations and the cosmos. Astrophysics and theoretical physics play a large thematic role in my work because both fields are a collection of systems. Much like my painting systems, they have yet to be fully explored. Discovering and manipulating ocular sensations activated by static images is the main purpose of my paintings.

I arrive at abstraction through the fusion of the universe, nature, and geological investigations via the process of painting. I embrace the dichotomies inherent in my work, such as abstraction versus representation, tangible versus intangible, finite versus infinite, and calculated versus spontaneous. Abstracting the tangible elements of nature and the intangible universe is a vehicle for alluding to otherness and the unseen. My process of painting includes both calculated and spontaneous marks that emphasize the tension between paint-as-material and its representational function.