Mundane events, personal failures, day-to-day experiences, and art history fuel my work. I approach every painting with a sense of urgency and humor. Images and subjects arrive through the action of painting, and are destroyed and rebuilt through trial and error. I use painting to depict my experiences of a frenetic, beautiful, and terrifying world.

I am interested in the link between words and meaning, and the creation of a surplus of value through interpretation. In the project Rise Above, a phonetic variation demolishes the expectations of the demand made in the title: “rise above” comes to mean something completely different—“rice above.”

My mom bought me a set of paints when I was a teenager. The first yield was a clumsy forest scene in which, despite its many problems, I saw some potential. If I could travel back in time to tell myself about the next fifteen years, I would explain that the outcome of that potential will continue to elude me and my peers. Sadly, we’ll have to watch beautiful minds fade from drugs and the crushing weight of societal pressures, and, worse, transform into pale pedantic shadows of their formerly vigorous selves. We must be on the wrong path! I’m sure that stupid kid would say he

My “marks” examine the fleeting nature of power and permanence through common and sometimes somewhat comical motifs such as stickers, flags, quilts, popsicles, and temporary tattoos. Questions surrounding patriotism, pride, and partisanship emerge in work that is both satirical and idealistic.

My work is driven by the transformation and manipulation of traditional and non-traditional materials and the exploration of unorthodox techniques. The work balances accident with control and gives permanence to the ephemeral. The absence of an original and the use of elaborate processes are inherent to my smoke, painting, and porcelain series.

I paint to try to make sense of this life and the world in which we live. This journey usually begins in familiar places from my childhood—rural landscapes and abandoned structures of the Carolinas. Combining a love of oil paint and art history, I’m interested in both creating and exploring psychological spaces, where mind and matter coalesce. I depict these icons of the American South not to monumentalize, but rather to question our histories and identities embedded and reflected within them. Nostalgia, violence, loss, love, guilt, fragility, shame, and complicity coexist.

I am a painter and a collector of fabric and clothing, most of which I find amid the dregs of fashion castoffs. I am drawn to this material as subject, as a proxy for abstract painting, as an alternative support for painterly marks, and as a vehicle of corporeal domesticity.