Statement

The explosive colors and decorative patterns in my work are intended to beautify ugliness and yet dangle on the edge of that which is not beautiful. For me the color is best when it is outrageously lurid, overindulgent and teeters on the point of oversaturation to become an abstraction of itself. The cinematic dimensions of these paintings unravel a simultaneity of events similar to the compression of time, space, and narrative depicted in renaissance tapestries. I respond to the humanism in the narratives of the renaissance works and so I’m imagining that the hunting and battle scenes of this era as predictors of the pattern of global disharmonies unfolding today. I use the repetition of a global motif like Paisley as a proverb or symbol for what I view as a recurrence of historical mistakes and misunderstandings reinforced by cultural myths that prevail and are corrupted over time in their retelling. The domesticity and the triviality of the pattern mixed with the underlying violence of the narrative are intended to suggest that something sinister lurks here. Animals play a role, as observers of cruelty or become active participants in that cruelty by virtue of the training received from their human masters. The use of pixilated, low-resolution images combined with an interruption of pattern causes a type of fragmentation in the scenes suggesting instability and how our place in this world is tenuous at best.