Artist Statement
My highest order of business in making a painting is to communicate, by infusion, a sense of feeling. I am interested in character, color, composition, storytelling, psychology, and symbolism, particularly the capacity of images to hold a multiplicity of meanings and associations rather than resolving neatly into a single interpretation. I think about composition in cinematic terms, as a form of framing that establishes a particular point of view and proximity. I am influenced by the languages of Jungian psychoanalysis and film, both of which engage deeply with narrative, character, and dreams: psychoanalysis through interpretation, and film through montage, with its mysterious, dreamlike stream of images and associations. I think of myself as a painter defined more by how I paint than by what I paint.
In my recent work, I collect orphaned Nativity figurines and other miniature characters, such as wedding-cake topper couples, and arrange them into new constellations that become starting points for paintings and imagined narratives. Working observationally from these pre-existing, archetypal figures allows me to direct them as characters while using tangible objects as source material for imaginative possibilities. I inhabit these characters much like an actor inhabits a role, while my own character as a painter emerges through my particular hand and the expressive choices I make as I interpret them. I am drawn to the Nativity in part as a symbolic image of the creative process. The paintings make physical a messy spiritual process of bringing something new to life.