Haunted Hive / All Experience is an Arch (2018)
For the past four years I have made all of my work in my studio in Danbury, Connecticut. The small space is filled with personal detritus, paintings, supplies and miscellaneous items purchased at the dollar store across the street. There are permanent and inherited fixtures, a large desk, a steam radiator, a stained glass window and a red mini piano – all remnants of the history of the space before I was there.
The space itself has become something of a self-portrait. I have a connection to all of the items inside, and I’m usually there alone. The room is carpeted in clues about my personality and behaviors, but it also has its own character, one beyond my manipulation that imposes itself on my work.
In my paintings, I try to communicate a specificity of place that is non-visual—the musty, attic-like smell, the sounds of an old building and a framing shop next-door. The sense of being in the center of a small city, but also feeling isolated and disconnected from it.
The space itself has become something of a self-portrait. I have a connection to all of the items inside, and I’m usually there alone. The room is carpeted in clues about my personality and behaviors, but it also has its own character, one beyond my manipulation that imposes itself on my work.
In my paintings, I try to communicate a specificity of place that is non-visual—the musty, attic-like smell, the sounds of an old building and a framing shop next-door. The sense of being in the center of a small city, but also feeling isolated and disconnected from it.
Tiny Spaces (2014)
In the past year, my focus has been on the creation of diminutive paintings of the small spaces in which I both live and work. Small paintings contain their own admissions about the enormity of painting. They invite intimate viewing in a way that larger pieces do not. A viewer can observe one section of a large painting from a close distance, but is able to see the entirety of a small painting from an equal distance. In that sense, a small painting is quite vulnerable.
Some of these paintings have taken me months to complete. They have been re-drawn, re-organized, and seen numerous changes in color and light. I labor over such decisions with the ultimate goal of conveying aspects of the space that are not contained by the purely visual. What does it sound and smell like? What is the temperature in the room? I want to discover in painting, a character beyond the visual.
Part of the goal in making these paintings is for me to eventually be able to paint my way out of the space and its constraints. I want to incorporate invented aspects, but have to spend a lot of time really investigating and understanding the space first.
Some of these paintings have taken me months to complete. They have been re-drawn, re-organized, and seen numerous changes in color and light. I labor over such decisions with the ultimate goal of conveying aspects of the space that are not contained by the purely visual. What does it sound and smell like? What is the temperature in the room? I want to discover in painting, a character beyond the visual.
Part of the goal in making these paintings is for me to eventually be able to paint my way out of the space and its constraints. I want to incorporate invented aspects, but have to spend a lot of time really investigating and understanding the space first.
