Artist's Statement

As an artist, my goal is to capture an elegiac quality in subjects both animate and inanimate. A phrase which, I believe, encapsulates my most recent work is "the presence of absence." What I continually strive against in my artistic endeavors is 'to make pretty pictures;' rather, I'd prefer to create compelling, thoughtful images.

The central theme of my work is memory: what informs memory, how does it change over time, why is that memories are often romanticized... or how is it that nostalgia or trauma often color memory accordingly. Other related aspects of memory in my work involve questions of identity, autobiography, and belief. I think that the ethereal quality of the work makes these aspects of the pieces available to the viewer...hopefully without too much additional explanation or guidance. More importantly than anything related to my drawings and photographs, I wish to have them speak for themselves.

In my most recent work, I am taking found (or "discarded") phrases and incorporating them into larger compositions. The inspiration came from some graphs and assembly instructions that I had laying on the floor of my studio. They had been walked on and were pretty dirty overall. The idea struck as I looked and saw the words and diagrams with dirt and footprints over the top of them. I began to realize that I had (both in my head and written down on scraps of paper) saved words and phrases that I had heard or seen in various situations. Those (sometimes) unique combinations needed to be utilized artistically. So, the new work is about discarded language and overheard phrases that may or may not have any intrinsic use or meaning; however, when read, the phrases typically conjure a visual response in the viewer's mind. So, the new work, although somewhat stylistically dissimilar to the images found in the "drawings" and "photography" sections of the site, keeps intact the ideas of absence and memory... in this case, absence of context or immediate recognition of meaning of phrases remembered from past experiences.

For a PDF Teaching Philosophy and Artist Statement click here