Orchid Collage

While stylistically influenced by graffiti, torn layers of city billboards, old building walls, I float between allowing a painting to organically determine its own direction and expression, and deliberately choosing subject matters that range from personal to controversial, painful to provocative, ironic to bizarre. Much of the stories that I paint are taken from people’s everyday lives, including my own, or statements about common, yet questionable, societal behaviors that have become generally accepted as the norm. Because the “everyday” is something that often gets overlooked or seen with indifference, I fill my paintings with commotion, perplexity, exaggeration and over-simplification in order to grab the viewer’s attention and cause them to really observe, decipher, and hopefully see these everyday happenings from a new perspective.    With the use of acrylics, joint compound, spray paint, water soluble crayons, pencils and graphite, sometimes newspaper/magazines, and several finishing coats of polycrylic, I overlap and intertwine figures, faces, shapes, text and objects. By doing this, I feel I have almost unlimited space within the confinement of the four walls of the canvas. My work is often filled with action and chaos, while still maintaining a certain balance and control, much like life itself.