art-making: bio: home

Art-making (both visual and sound-based) occupies a vital space in my life. Through it, I am able to simultaneously investigate myself and the world around me. I learn about myself by stepping away from the canvas and evaluating what my choice of subject-matter implies. I learn about the surrounding world by keeping my eyes and ears open as often as possible, comparing what I observe to what I paint. One major inspiration for my work comes from the mass-media advertisements of television, radio, magazines, and the internet. Every day, our capitalist society is flooded with advertisements designed to make us feel empty. Remedies for this emptiness are presented in many forms (including: clothing, hair products, fast food, prescription drugs, and many others) in order to convince consumers that they have not consumed enough. Rather than duplicate this trend, however, my paintings recycle the subject-matter of advertisements into new visual contexts. Some images are inserted like collages in new arrangements, changed proportionally or chromatically to highlight different areas than the source material. Some are abstracted beyond immediate recognition, emphasizing shape, texture, or color. As a result, my paintings create pictorial spaces which are more accurately reflective of the human experience than the content of capitalist mass-media imagery. Life is complicated, containing multiple moments of both confusion and clarity, both of which are vital elements in my work. The process used to create each composition is influenced by the creative musical act of jazz improvisation. I apply oil to canvas during time-periods of “performance,” like a musician in a recording studio, painting forms according to interests that arise in the moment. Often, the painting starts off with a specific direction, only to lead into visual directions I never considered. Each layer of paint is like another instrument being added to the sound recording, reacting to the colors and shapes like a pianist whose job is to compliment an improvising saxophonist. It is this improvisatory exploration into the unforeseen that continually energizes me about art creation. My work is a reflection of the cluttered commercial landscape that surrounds us, full of excitement, mystery, and confusion.