In my most recent paintings, I am sourcing images and creating my own language of symbols to make fantastical landscapes and cities that are loosely based around the theme of Utopias. These landscapes act as metaphors for our simulations of natural habitats, social structures, and perfected consumerist environments. Within the fantasy lies a gray area of cultural seduction and exploitation where I can explore my desire, repulsion and contribution to it.

My work investigates the complexity of existence and order that is found in my immediate environment. Patterns of being are found in all levels of our daily experience, from the way we inhale and exhale to the route we take to our favorite watering hole. These patterns have existed long before we have, taking shape in countless forms. Microscopic particles, growth systems, and migratory paths are almost inconceivable parts of the whole that we hardly take the time to consider.

“Starry night encounter” is my personal translation of the Japanese phrase ichi-go ichie. It is an idea found in Zen Buddhism: the concept of the transitory nature of things. The term is adopted in the Japanese tea ceremony: a 7-by-7-foot space, a guest, a simple serving of a cup of tea. Every meeting is the first and the last because it may not come again, or it may infinitely repeat.

The drip paintings grew out of a collaborative piece I completed in San Antonio in which Dominick Talvacchio and I covered the walls of a gallery space with drips of paint, all appearing to drip up the walls. Shortly after completing that installation I began to experiment with how I could use this process to make paintings. I have always been interested in space. I am attracted to the type of space that can be created by moving in and out of the grid. I am also interested in how the work functions in space and how one’s experience can shift at different vantage points.

I don’t make easy paintings. I don’t make difficult or confusing paintings either. My paintings are complex, but accessible. They do, however, deliver more if you have somewhat of an understanding of the painting process and a decent knowledge of art history. Still, anyone can stand in front of one of my paintings and walk away at least intrigued, if they allow themselves. I am not interested in taking art beyond aesthetics.

The need to communicate is important. Being heavily influenced by comic books and the stories I read as a child, the idea of sequence and narrative has become essential to my drawings. By animating my body language, using symbols, and adding text I create a visual conversation with the viewer and myself. The words, phrases, or lyrics that appear offer multiple interpretations and double meanings that signify an inability to effectively communicate with others.

We see and recognize color, gesture, form, and mark in painting as disseminated by art history and through the media. My work makes allusions to gestural abstraction, color field painting, romanticism, as well as other art-historical moments. Here they are reformatted.

My work illustrates a fantastic landscape. It represents nature’s subtle way of dealing with peculiar aspects in its relationship with mankind. A giant glow-in-the-dark heart, or a pile of precious gems, tells us that we are loved, just as blood squirting from an oak tree trunk says, “all is not well.” I am inspired by my conversation with the landscape; I imagine long monologues when pine forests make me laugh and mountains test my patience.

My work explores the experience of place. Initially I work from the personal outward, using my perspective as a lens to understanding a place. From there I apply traditional aesthetic discourses of landscape theory on this specific landscape, keeping in mind what this location has traditionally meant in American history and culture. From the mimetic European imagery of the “picturesque” to the uniquely American vistas of the “sublime,” I explore how these relate in form and metaphor to the American landscape of today.

In repetition there is order and structure, but also endless variation. By trying to create a perfect mark by hand, its individuality and imperfections become more and more apparent. I combine this distinctive mark with that of the printed mark to contrast their inherent natures and serve as visual reminders of a struggle to balance two realities.