My work is a conversation between figure, contrast, texture, and color that reflects many of my earliest visual interests as an artist: collage, pattern, advertising, graffiti, ghost signs, and painting. I layer found images—throwaway materials such as unwanted books and magazines, junk mail, and security envelopes—with my own paintings, drawings, and mark making to create abstract images that invite viewers to engage with personal histories within our visually cluttered lives.
At the forefront of my process is materiality and experimentation. Each painting begins with a series of fast collage-based studies and a willingness to see where materials take me. I select imagery by focusing on color, repurposing found imagery as abstract marks I then layer and integrate with my own brush strokes and drawings. Much like listening to a conversation in a crowded place, I use chance as its own art supply; I’m as interested in what gets cut out of a word or image, in the negative space that creates, as I am in making work with distinct meaning from the original subject matter or the era of source materials.
Ephemerality is a throughline in my work, both in the sense of destruction in the literal acts of tearing, cutting, painting over, and in the acknowledgement of the constant addition of imagery to the world every day in the forms of junk mail, advertising, billboards, social media, AI imagery, the 24 hour news cycle, and packaging, all exacerbated by increasingly fast means of visual and material production and the willing eyeballs of the modern consumer. Whenever I sift through collage materials, I’m acutely aware that those materials, no matter how mundane, are the ephemera of someone else’s life. As I work on a piece, I’ll often fabricate my own stories and associations. I don’t endeavor to make the viewer see that particular narrative, but I want them to start to make one for themselves, to bring their own history into the deliberate chaos of the image I’ve made. At the very least the imagery is in service of abstraction.
Approaching concrete forms in these abstract ways requires a lot of planning and risk taking at once. I have to be both intentional and loose at all stages. It’s an ongoing experiment to figure out what is too much and what is precisely enough. It’s a thrilling practice of discovery and play, requiring a willingness to make the results unknown even to myself at certain stages, involving a high level of trust in my skills and instincts as well as careful editing of six or more layers to achieve the harmony and beauty I’m after in the finished work.
