Artist Statement
Painting from direct experience is how I am present within my work. My practice is influenced from the ever changing community I am immersed in. I paint portraits and figurative scenes from direct lived experiences. I use my paintings as a medium for storytelling and identity. My art is a time capsule of personal history, memories, and moments. My paintings explore humanity and chronicles intimate and collaborative relationships. I am detailing the experience of now and creating work that acts as yearbook photos of human experience.
My reality is reflected in my paintings. I include a secret self portrait in place of a signature to create a physical presence and a physical reflection in addition to a metaphorically one. I use heavy color saturation to develop a language of strong color relationships. I am investigating color theory’s various effects on relative contrast, color saturation, how light can bend around the subject, and the implications it has for identity and portrait tradition on a historical scale. I solidify my place in time with portraiture that engages and cements moments from history. Chronicling personal observations of human experience as means to fighting the entropy of time is the catalyst for my paintings. An endless exploration of new subject matter is born from the marathon that is living and lifelong painting.
Evolutionary game theory, states that perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions, influences my surrealist leanings. This theory influences my exploration of surrealist elements that work to distort familiar places and real experiences, namely in my painting titled, ‘The Ecstasy of St. Vitus’. Heironymous Bosch and Magritte influence my imaginative distortions of familiar places, experiences, memory, and history to create work that holds to be more real than realism.
I believe our reality reflects subjective experience. The act of investigation in my work is key to exploring if our reality and the world we live in is a mirror, a window, or an illusion. My paintings are my way to explore my own existence and the experiences both shared and observed. Lifelong painting from experience is a practice in intimacy and honesty. It is the only way I successfully fight the entropy of time. I wish to grow by investigating intimacy, social dialogue through historical portraiture tradition, expanding my artistic language and toolkit in an interdisciplinary focused atmosphere, and create a cohesive confessional body of work to carve out my place in time.