In Plain Sight Painting

My work is focused on the human condition. I am interested in exploring the places we occupy -- physical and emotional.  In my latest paintings, I am concerned with documenting what I see and with the fantastic.  The work combines my own perception of human emotion and invented narrative. Through my interactions with real people - friends and strangers, I distill a story, a feeling or a fragment of their experiences. Artists that particularly influenced my work are Richard Daad, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Neil Jenney. Richard Daad was a British painter active between 1837 and 1886. Aside from his unbelievable patience and minute attention to detail, I am fascinated with his ability to harness an otherworldly imagination that makes his work relevant and contemporary even today. I am someone that is intrigued by the idea of darkness and finds it important to go through this darkness in search of light. Like the characters in Bacon’s work, mine come alive for me as I paint them. I love the idea of creating my own creatures. The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History greatly influenced my landscape paintings. A line that would ordinarily be straight on a flat canvas, would have to be rendered as curve in a diorama. I read somewhere that Alexis Rockman spent a lot of time looking at dioramas and that they had a profound influence on his work. James Wilson’s dioramas taught me how to look at trees, plants, rocks, and light. Like James Prosek’s work, I believe that the artist must look to nature for inspiration but must rearrange the elemental truths into an orderly sequence or progression of interests. That said, both Rockman and Prosek verge on the boundary of Fine Art and Science, something that has always intrigued me. As far as my process goes, I begin by doing extensive research on a particular topic. I look at the work of other artists and the various approaches to an idea. When I am working on a figure, I need to understand the anatomy of the figure in that particular pose and so it is important for me to study the bone and muscle structure and how the skeleton looks underneath the skin. Next, I make three to four quick thumbnail studies. When I’m ready to begin working on the canvas, I draw a final sketch. Then, I mix my colors and begin to paint. I would like to work on large figure paintings that mimic life in both scale and complexity.