artist statement Painting

I paint diptych portraits using photographs of friends as reference material. These portraits examine the notion that we are, at once, known and unknown to ourselves. Both photography and portraiture are able to show us an instant in time past—and present. Photography can capture what actually was while painting can show us a different truth unavailable to the camera. I turned to diptychs because the police booking photos, often posted on post office walls, intrigued me. I wondered how these desperate people were like or unlike me. During the painting process, I determined that the diptychs became enhanced when the profile image faced toward the front facing image (unlike typical booking photos where the profile image looks away). This shift in orientation resulted in a substantial change in the meaning of the portraits. It caused me to shift my focus from a booking image model to a focus on a self-talk model. Self-talk is the kind of internal monologue we all engage in that monitors how we’re doing from moment to moment. Therefore as the work has evolved I have become ever more interested in how the two paintings interact with each other and of course how they affect the imagined third person in the room, namely the viewer. I acknowledge Diego Velazquez, because without his great work painting as we know it would not exist; Francisco Goya because of his emotionally charged insight into human nature; and Edouard Manet for his psychological insight, color sense and flat-space painting style. Contemporary influences are early Chuck Close, because of the emotional impact of his subjects and his cool painting style; Gerhard Richter, who altered the relationship between painting and photography with his often unsettling work; and Luc Tuymans, whose reductive paintings powerfully conjure associations while using so little paint.