"Bella" Painting

My approach is both perception-based and surrealist. I move things around, scrape things out, and see the painting's identity emerge over time. My spatial sense is an amiable, cubistic “horror vacui,” my brain probably hardwired toward complexity from growing up as one of ten children. I like painting the figure foreshortened, where forms move back in space yet stack up on the picture plane, contradictions that echo Cubism. Scale dislocation began to appear in my work when I lived in Rome eight years. I painted still life as visionary cities, then placed giant figures in them. I went there on a Fulbright to study saints' strange fusion of the neurotic and the sublime, which continues in portraits with thought, emotion, and memory piled up on my head. Still lifes often contain references to Monopoly, which was based on Atlantic City, where I lived four years, and which reminded me of Rome’s historical center in an inverse way: intense visual drama, a small scale, sculptural effect, and self-conscious architecture. But Roman monuments heroically endure, while Atlantic City structures last no longer than their frivolous functions do - a caricature of American values. In all my paintings, detailed rendering vs. flat color, sensitivity vs. obtuseness, pop culture vs. metaphysical gravity - interact.