ARTIST STATEMENT

I've been painting for over twenty years, and I still don't know exactly why I do it. What I do know is that when I'm standing in front of a canvas, something honest happens that doesn't happen anywhere else in my life. That's enough of a reason to keep going.

I work from the body first — mine, and the ones I paint. Before I know what a piece is "about," I know how it feels: the pull of a gesture, the weight of a shoulder, the way one color sitting next to another changes the temperature of the room. I trust that feeling more than any idea I walked in with. The making itself — the decisions, the corrections, the visible evidence of a hand changing its mind — is the honesty. I'm not hiding the process behind the image. The process is the image.

I paint people because bodies move me, and I'm betting they'll move you too — before you've had a chance to think about what you're looking at. I'm not trying to depict a figure. I'm trying to get as close as paint can get to what it's actually like to be near one: the heat, the weight, the strange intimacy of another creature occupying space next to yours.

Here's the standard I hold the work to: think about encountering a hammerhead shark underwater. It doesn't mean anything. You couldn't explain what it means if you tried. And it's still one of the most meaningful things that can happen to a person. That's the register I want a painting to work in — not a message you decode, but an encounter you have.

Paint can do more than show what things look like. Handled a certain way, it can be built the way experience itself is built — layered, physical, incomplete, alive, still arriving. When a painting is working, you're not looking at a picture of something. Something is happening to you.

I grew up in the Shambhala Buddhist community in Boulder, Colorado, which trained me early to look at things before my mind could file them under a name. The artist Robert Irwin put it well: “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”. That training shaped how I see everything — not as scenery, not as material to be used, but as something alive and owed my full attention. That's what I want the paint to do too: not comment on the world, not explain it, just stay present with it long enough that something true comes through.

If a painting is doing its job, I want you to leave it feeling something like this: that who you are is a little mysterious, fundamentally good, and doesn't need to be fixed or figured out in order to be worth knowing. You already are that. The painting isn't telling you something new. It's just reminding you.