Painted presentations of visceral bacchanalia, hillbilly witchcraft, and degenerate portraiture.

The works are glimpses of narratives, with a focus on the human figure. The characters belong to their own social contexts, where fictitious chaos meets blatant references, satirical violence, and humor. They act on their animal (often maniacal and sexual) nature with exploited and often tragic exiguity.

Darkness is the condition from which we all come. It is the matrix of infinite form and possibility from which light picks and chooses the objects it illuminates and brings into existence. In my art, I have discovered parallels between this interplay of darkness and light, and the interplay of black ink and white paper. The subjects of my current body of work may be the Louisiana animals and vegetation which surround me (both of which have fascinated me since I was a child growing up amongst sugar cane farmers in and around the exotic environs of Avery Island).

Much of my personal work is an exploration on the subject of home, from a self-reflective and self-critical perspective. Home is defined as being the place where a person, family, or household lives, but can home only be defined as a physical landscape? By creating a series of visual allegories, my work both documents and strives to interpret the key constituents which identify home and make it distinct from any other place.

My reading of Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space” has had a profound effect on how I relate my own personal space to memories and experiences. Substituting furniture, doorways, windows, or other domestic architectural elements with these geometric forms separates the viewer from the memories of my past spaces that the original objects lived in. To further enhance the ambiguity of the space, I have been exploring “the blank,” an abstract form that may be read as a negative space, a solid object, or even a thought bubble.

Portrait, still life, landscape, history, and traditional genres of painting are broken down through symbols, marks taken from tattooed skin, walls of graffiti, and open public media. These images, which are collected and archived as source material, are altered, layered, flattened, and re-contextualized to become emblems of contemporary documentary. They are then presented in the format of a backdrop or stage, size and configuration dictating a space in which something more happens.

In my paintings, I endeavor to focus on the interstices of architectural space in an attempt to marry the inside with outside. Consequently, I seek to depict structures from several different perspectives and sometimes repeatedly as a means to emphasize fluctuations of mood and emotion. The constructions in these works exist only as paint, yet they allow me to lay the foundation necessary to explore questions of time and permanence. I present a detached viewpoint and generate room for introspection, where a sense of silence permeates.

My paintings attempt to show the phenomena of contemporary cities and spaces from my own embodied perception, that is, from the perspective of being inside these as opposed to viewing them from afar. Thus, my personal experience of the environment pervades; objects and spaces exist in an amplified setting in which the excesses of our society have created an abundance of remnants. I endeavor to counter this fragmentation with an expression of harmony, to generate a feeling of accord that emerges in an atmosphere of dissonance.

I’m interested in the history of childhood as a concept. Today, childhood seems to be in a perpetual state of redefinition, with influences from the media, commerce, technology, and globalization. I am also fascinated with late 15th to early 16th century European painting. During this period, Realism in art was instrumental to religious devotion. Holy figures were represented as corporeal, yet idealized beings. I feel that this tradition is echoed in the adoration of children in contemporary secular society.

I find my subject matter everywhere: in the images of the commonplace, the everyday, rather than the exotic or the perfect. It is a fascination with patterns that drives my selection of subject matter, rather than the subjects themselves. By eliminating the context provided by background and examining a subject close-up and enlarged, the resulting composition can be viewed abstractly as a complex arrangements of colors and textures with inherent aesthetic value apart from its representation of an object or place. The resulting in-your-face compositions are intense.

The atmosphere of the Deep South in which I was raised was permeated with secrecy and illusion. Family surveillance, church hypocrisy, and a Mandarinesque social system produced a keen awareness that life was being designed behind many delicate screens. For years I’ve been living in Northern cities and the Western high country. This first group of paintings since my return to New Orleans functions as a decryption for veiled meanings, using forms that suggest the most sensual of emotions: anticipation.