My current paintings and drawings are characterized by entire surfaces and forms covered with small incremental marks and/or line-infused “blobs” of paint that are built up over time to evolve into sensuous, dramatic wholes. The paintings, for example, are crooked canvases that advance inches from the wall and are encrusted with limpet like globs of mottled appearance.

My work is an ongoing investigation into my personal history. Attempting to create a dialogue between past and present, I work alternately from vintage photographs and from those that I have taken in and around the region of West Central Wisconsin.

My work explores mythologies white middle-class America creates through the history and institutions of childhood and family. Through my drawings, I investigate experiences of narrating family life, both personal and societal, in order to explore the development of identity, of individual and communal memory. I study the emergency of sexuality, subjectivity, and community through transitions like immigration, generational shifts, and familial and cultural legacies. I look for moments of disconnect between experience and perception, constructing visual tales of those points of slippage.

My work centers on the experience of moving through physical spaces while acknowledging their psychological effect. Within this broad concept of space, my interests encompass the characteristics of urban and natural environments, observing the constant flux of each. Recent works focus on universal events in the natural landscape; I am fascinated by how the place is a constantly regenerated image, and document these shifts through photography. Out of this index of images, I create paintings and drawings that are a compilation of these observations, generated from memory.

My paintings depict an imaginary world, its rural environments, inhabitants, and their interactions with one another. The customs, rituals, superstitions, and conflicts of this place appear fragmented, superficial glimpses of a larger narrative. My work is influenced by my perceptions of rural life growing up in the hills of southwestern Wisconsin, as well as visual experiences that continue to captivate me. I present these images; divorced from any autobiographical context or obvious symbolic intent, and let them exist simply as aesthetic elements.

With an artistic training in figurative realism and a background in graphic design, my paintings unite my interest in the psyche as expressed through the human form and a personal graphic aesthetic. Thematically, my paintings address the complexity of memory, by blurring the lines between recollection, projection, and reality. Each painting becomes a psychological landscape or waking dream, reinforcing the fluid relationships between time, memory and place.

My recent work is the expression of how nature responds to the man-made structures in our urban surroundings. I observe as nature crawls its way to the surface of the sidewalks, train tracks, and brick walls that comprise New York City. Inspired by the imagery of my daily life, I create deserted landscapes which are produced primarily with pen, ink, and washes of paint. These spaces serve as a witness to abandoned human activity. I intend to record the moment when decay begins, or when something new, something different is to be born.

The dominant imagery in my work is of figures immersed in water. In this series of paintings the figures are completely engulfed, leaving only the unique and specific features of the face defined against the anonymity of the water. Individualism is being swallowed up by a larger elemental force. I think about water as having an equalizing power over all immersed. Whether human or animal, basic breath is at the surface of consciousness and individual movement is at the pleasure of the water.

I am interested in the juncture between Design and Nature, specifically design that is meant to be consumed in the form of fashion, decoration, art, and music. Perhaps in today’s urban-influenced culture, in light of concerns about the environment and rapidly dwindling resources, people are changing their relationship to nature. More and more I am seeing wall-mounted decals of birds, silhouettes of tree branches on t-shirts, and artwork that seems to gravitate toward very specific animals and other natural imagery.

During the last four years I have deliberately practiced art disregarding, if necessary, coherent visual reading (the stylistic aspects of the art work). Art making moves in very organic ways, like growing, aging, or a life experience. Art and life are directly linked in my practice. Coming from one person’s perspective, daily life and world events become one subjective opinion when used to represent commentary. History and memories are fictions, transgressions as well, and I allow them to exist in that matter.