Artist’s Statement

I began painting on newsprint out of necessity. As a teenager, it was readily available, inexpensive, easily stored and transported. Newsprint lacked the preciousness which left me feeling timid when approaching a canvas, especially as I began to exchange brushes for my own finger tips. Finger painting on newsprint offered both an immediacy and a practicality to my process. As the newsprint itself began to age, I was moved by the temporality of the medium: the way in which the text, the images, the canvas itself brittled and yellowed, while the subject remained a constant. I came to embrace this gradual decay, the fading of the subject’s original context, time articulating itself on the canvas. 

There is, then, a delightful contradiction, in painting the human form onto a canvas in transition. I am moved by the enduring architecture of human bodies, the power and vulnerability they wield, their ability to challenge or celebrate the ideals and desires of their given context. The context, however, is not insignificant to my work. My subjects are often in dialogue with the stories and narratives that surround them, offering up their horror, rage, confusion, dissatisfaction, resilience, and amusement. The stories that surround each figure change over time, the world as we know it brittles and yellows, order topples and is restored. The context dulls. The human form endures, in all its brilliant color.