Brain Attic Painting

I was born in Princeton, NJ, where I spent my first eight years living on a university campus. My grandmother, Joy Saville, was a well-regarded textile artist, and my mother studied art in college, so art has always been a part of my life. As a young child, my father would take me to the Princeton University Art Museum, where he would have me do a sort of scavenger hunt. I would have to look at the paintings to find things on the list – a man on a horse, a woman holding a baby, a mountain in the distance, a man with arrows sticking in him, or a man eating spaghetti. Later, after moving to the Berkshires, I would visit The Clark Art Institute or The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and wander around. Sometimes, I would make sketches of some of the paintings in Moleskine notebooks with my friend Emily who pointed out many interesting aspects of the works we saw. But in those days, my art was confined to drawing cartoons or making all sorts of contraptions in my dad’s woodworking shop. I had no thought of becoming an artist or doing anything seriously with art when I was in high school. I put off taking the required art course until my senior year, chiefly because I did not want to subject myself to the constraints that I imagined art teachers would subject me to. If I were to make art, I would do it my way and on my terms. I thought I wanted to study archaeology. In high school, I participated in an archaeological dig at Verde Mesa, Colorado, and another in England, run by the University of Oxford School of Archaeology. Later I spent time in Ireland at an experimental archaeology workshop run by the University College Dublin School of Archaeology, where I applied and was admitted to the undergraduate program. By this time, I was sketching and drawing more and more and had begun experimenting with painting. And I began taking classes at IS183 Art School of the Berkshires in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As the time to go to Dublin drew near, I realized that instead of digging up artifacts made long ago, I wanted to make my own; instead of studying material culture, I wanted to create it. I am drawn to the work of Albrecht Dürer, Vincent Van Gogh, Norman Rockwell, Ronald Searle, Zdzisław Beksiński, Eben Haines, and Alice Neel. I especially enjoy experimenting with color and portraiture after the example of Lucian Freud. I resist categorizing my work into genres or styles. Defining a genre is highly limiting, and I'm trying to avoid it now.