"Smoking Astronaut" Painting

A compelling sense that art can be socially responsible and beautiful is the reason I paint.

My paintings attempt to represent our human-built world and the natural world on the same surface at the same time. As the artist, I am just trying to convey some thoughts about them in this statement. Your interpretations are equally valid. If a painting is remarkable, it continues to impress you in unexpected ways that expand every time you look at it.

The paintings reference commonplace images like video games, carnival, television, headaches, nature, disasters, charms, signs and symbols. Nature, beauty, loss, climate, mortality and art are central themes in these works.

An idea for a painting often comes from something seen. Just as often, it begins with the idea itself and an image must be imagined or found. To paint about a single, devastating hurricane neglects the repeated appearance of these superstorms and the climate change driving their severity. Hurricanes are cyclones, the name changing with your location. After making a painting of the Cyclone rollercoaster on Coney Island, the idea of a series came into being while studying a work by Jasper Johns. Johns himself used the design of Edvard Munch’s quilt to design his own painting titled: “Corpse/Mirror”. The designs by these two artists served as the foundation for five elegies to cyclones – Katrina, Harvey, Maria, Sandy and Irma. Later, the painting Canary Weather was created in an attempt to paint a definitive work on climate change.

Nature, beauty, loss, climate, mortality and art are central themes in these works.

Images in some of the paintings are partially obscured by bands of color, producing a louvered visual field. This is similar to bands of mist in scrolls by Wang Hui painted for the Emperor of China in 1698. Likewise, these bands of color resemble the national flag of Greece. In this way, those who have gone before us are acknowledged, their influence and presence clearly visible in the design of these artworks, resulting in a ‘bigger picture’.

I practice Slow Painting. Which, as Martin Herbert writes, is the concept of 'slowness' and what it might mean in relation to contemporary painting: how it might be present in the making of the work, how the works reveal themselves slowly, and how they fit into the continuum of art history.