Statement

I constantly feel the weight of my body. I feel the mythology of my childhood, my dreams and anxieties, and my physical inadequacy. I’ve spent a long time hating my body, always feeling like a stranger to myself. I coped by hiding my true sense of self, imagining it as a metal ball in the center of my sternum. Although this mechanism was originally protective, I’ve increasingly felt the need to free myself from its weight and reestablish harmony between my psychic and somatic selves. Painting is my way of digging up these guarded parts of myself, as if I’m feeling around for a light switch in a dark cellar. That moment where clarity in the subject and the painting clicks into place is when that internal light casts out the darkness. 

Through imagined interiors, humanoid landscapes, and mystical abstractions, I seek to dissolve my self-imposed cartesian dualism and come to terms with myself. The spaces I paint serve as metaphorical portraits of the inside of my body, creating characters to which I can relate. These imagined identities were born out of the physical grief of Käthe Kollwitz’s figures, the grotesque superstition of Goya’s black paintings, and the sense of searching in Gorky and De Kooning’s abstractions. As my relationship to my body is sensate in nature, making figurative paintings that escape linear narrative has been my main goal. The cyclical imagery in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All inspired me to use the body as a framing device rather than as a subject. I painted landscapes as figures, painting plants and mountains as I would a leg or an arm. Although this imagery owed a lot to Surrealism, I wanted the process to create something new instead of recording channeled images. My work therefore became more and more improvised, remaining completely abstract for the majority of the process until pulled into focus in the final stages. The results have been totemic paintings that feel like artifacts of myself while representing ongoing communication with my subconscious.

Learn More