My recent work addresses both a personal and cultural proclivity towards the end of time. The images depicted are like hallucinogenic visions forecasting some impending cataclysm. They have all the customary objects in them, the mundane places that were once so familiar and quieting, still something is amiss. The worlds are ridden with structures synonymous with humans, and others that are not, yet all are empty. Filling the void is another, more ominous presence.

My paintings combine elements of graffiti, textile patterns, botanical illustrations, tattoos, and Eastern religions. These are the elements I place within my kaleidoscopic chamber, where they converge to form a symmetrical matrix.

Chaos and structure have long been a common thread in the fabric of my work. My recent series of works employ circles and rings as rigid forms, using color, size, and placement to achieve a theme such as a landscape or a map. The background texture suggests halted movement as though each element were suspended in time. The chaos and structure of each painting form a perfect continuity.

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.” —Jean Baudrillard, “Vanishing Point,” America (1986)

My paintings are hybrids distilling life experience and observation with visual culture. Two strands unite most of my work: animal imagery and the influence of medieval bestiaries. To make order and sense of the natural world, medieval scholars compiled bestiaries that intertwined folk tales and legends with fantasy, classical writings, and direct behavioral observation. The result was an artful, imaginative distillation. Those texts prompted me to reconsider the need to make contemporary art rooted solely in the here and now.

A constant element of my work has been the significance of process, repetition, and time. In works comprised of paper scrolls, I mark individual strips of paper with handwritten and printed Farsi (Persian language) text. Each strip is then tightly rolled to create a core, around which successive strips are added. Repeated in the work is the word for love, or “eshghe. ” The repetition of this particular word is a recurring element in much of my work of the last decade.

The inter-penetrating layers of symbolism, mysticism, and narrative in my work constitute a timeless world of ancient rituals and divinatory rites. In synthesizing techniques of the old masters, ancient mystical teachings, and contemporary science, my work focuses on the uniqueness and universality of inner landscapes and transcendent experience.

My work is deliberately formal and multilayered. I employ a combination of printmaking and painting with layers of color, glaze, texture, and pattern. The pieces play with the boundaries between design and texture.

Quilting traditions, oriental rugs, and kaleidoscopes inspire the application of multiple images, fabric-like effects, and the lack of deep space or volume.

In these paintings the edges are firm and significant, but the surface is my primary concern, with layers of glaze over layers of pattern, over collage and stitching; using color, shape, texture and the human face.

I love having bruises that I can touch throughout the day to instigate memory.

Sometimes the bruise is a broken lip; sometimes exhaustion; sometimes the way light falls on skin.

Painting is touching the bruise.

I explore landscapes that are reshaped by human intervention. From a conceptual standpoint the subjects touch upon universal themes including solitude, death, anxiety, transience, speed, confrontation, compression, isolation, reflection, fear, and collision. The emphasis on these concerns places the work within a long tradition of Romantic American painting including artists such as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. At the same time, my work is created within the context of the present, a time of pluralism in terms of visual expression. My brushwork is informed by neo-expressionism.