ARTIST STATEMENTS

THE BODY

In the early 2010's, I started making highly detailed, all-over paintings of the surfaces of my own hands. This work came in response to my growing awareness of a relatively new phenomenon: the decline of touch in an increasingly digital culture. I had initially become preoccupied with the visual, sensual and conceptual idiosyncrasies of skin in an earlier series of paintings of extreme close-ups of my lips, tongue and teeth captured in the act of biting into a Bing cherry. In 2013, I made structurally similar paintings of the surface of the ocean. Though not as literal, these works were also primarily about sensual experience, in this case, the feeling of the water as it envelopes and buoys -or resists- the body. Very recently, this preoccupation has morphed into a musing on the uses and potential misuses of biometric data in a security-obsessed world. These new works, which I've loosely dubbed Biometric Portraits, are oil on shaped-canvas paintings of human irises and fingertips, presented in busy 24 kt gold-leafed frames. Among other things, the work riffs on the hallmark tropes of wealth and status that have punctuated traditional portraiture for centuries, parallels that I see between the value placed on personal data and on fine art in contemporary culture, and our somewhat reckless faith in technology.

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A concurrent and related body of work, Better Living Thru Chemistry, consists of brightly colored, glass and mixed media capsule-shaped objects that incorporate machine-cut vinyl decals of SMS shorthand (texts +/or emoji), and hang freely on invisible supports as wall-relief sculptures. They can seem fun and light while highlighting our modern reverence for the quick fix, be it pharmaceutical or emotional, the latter manifesting in the form of precarious virtual relationships that stand in for real connection, and the self-branding facilitated by social media.
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THE COUNTRY "America is not a place, it is a road." * - Mark Twain

Evening in America (aka Night Tripper) and Big Country are two current series of paintings through which I explore the mythologies and realities of the American landscape as seen from the perspective of a traveler, often at night. The settings hover between the built world and the natural landscape, and although no people are pictured, each composition preserves some residue of the human presence: a power line, a building, or simply the road itself. My intention is to take the viewer into the scene, showing just as much (or as little) sharp detail as the human eye and mind can process in person. The point of view and painting style reflect the fleeting nature of impressions, especially those formed while driving on deserted roads in low light.

Night Tripper is a series of small oil paintings of seasonally abandoned beach roads depicted at the liminal moment between dusk and nightfall. The title references the spooky alter ego of Doctor John and all that it implies about the ambiguity of twilight: it's equal potential for magic and danger. These paintings feature two spots on Cape Cod: Route 6 at the Provincetown/Truro line, and a secluded route that leads to Head of the Meadow, a wildly beautiful beach in the National Seashore which featured prominently in an earlier body of my work entitled Platinum Sea, paintings of the surface of the ocean (2013-16). This work picks up where that left off, substituting the surface of the road for that of the sea, and following a circuitous journey through the strange, tattered and often charming back roads and scenic byways of America, an entire country that has itself been famously characterized as more of a journey than a destination.*

Evening In America, the title of my 2020 solo show at Lyons Wier Gallery in NYC, was intended to be both a literal description of the paintings in the exhibition which are all set in late afternoon or early evening, as well as a comment on the current state of the nation both at home and on the world stage. Conceived before the pandemic, but no less relevant now (perhaps more), the words reference Ronald Regan's re-election campaign ad that featured imagery of Americans starting their day in a bright sunny world behind the jingoistic slogan, "It's morning again in America".

Big Country is a series of oil paintings based on imagery gathered while navigating the US & Canada by motorcycle. These works explore the notions of "home" and "away", and how my sense of these things is impacted by my personal history, American mythology, and the rise of digital culture. But their primary subject is the visual experience of motorcycling, which is simultaneously fragmented and completely immersive. The world appears to me alternately in tiny half-blurred snatches glimpsed in in my rearview mirrors, and the unmatched 180 degree perspective afforded by a view unbstructed by the structure of an enclosed vehicle. The series' title references the artist Edward Avedisian's description of America, which appeared in his obituary in Hyperallergic in 2013. The full quote, "It's a big country, and the only thing keeping it together is television", struck me as hilarious and oddly consistent with my own impressions of these loosely United States (though one might be tempted to substitute "tik tok" for "television" at this point).

These are scenes from a road trip. The road trip is a present-day expression of the distinctly American values of rebellion, freedom and restlessness embedded in the national psyche by the country's founders, and later realized in the conveyance of the internal combustion engine. Recent technological advances have ushered in a new era that threatens this tradition. One of the unintended consequence of ubiquitous personal computing is a historic decline in the number of teenagers pursuing that most quintessentially American rite of passage: the acquisition of a driver's license. The rise of digital culture has rendered the physical distribution of people and goods less urgent at the very least, if not completely unnecessary. People are no longer isolated socially or professionally by geography because many jobs can be done remotely; texts and chat take the place of face-to-face personal contact. Conversely, the distinction between home and work becomes increasingly vague when one is constantly accessible. And when there is no centralized workplace, personal space and time is less clearly defined. In such a time, it is both refreshing and strange to drive around the small towns and natural wonders that dot back roads and byways, visiting places that have yet to be subsumed by big box stores and national chain restaurants. The reward is a front row seat on a very different America, one rife with odd and often charming, if somewhat shabby, idiosyncrasies.

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PLATINUM SEAS are paintings of fragments of the surface of the North Atlantic ocean, composed in a muted palette made up exclusively of cadmium red light, titanium white and indigo extra. Subtle changes in temperature and tone are achieved through minute adjustments to the proportions of these 3 components. The perspective is extreme, often bringing the composition to the brink of abstraction. Situational cues such as a horizon line or light source are intentionally cropped out. What remains is an unbounded section of sensual topography, the actual scale and orientation of which is unknowable and unimportant. This, combined with the essentially fractal nature of this subject matter, fosters an ambiguity that keeps the focus on the materiality of both the subject and the painting.

Throughout, I use my own digital photographs as source imagery. The technology enables me to closely examine things as disparate as the human hand and the ocean with equal facility. Using a device no more powerful or expensive than a cell phone, I can capture a level of detail or moment in time that is not accessible through casual observation. And through careful editing I identify elements or phrases within the larger context that can be at once intimate and universal, timeless and ephemeral. This process mirrors contemporary visual experience, recently described as "The Forever Now" in a painting show of the same name at MoMA. The term refers to a flattening of time into a perpetual present, resulting from the vast, ever-expanding collective memory of the digital age, which blends bits (and bytes) from a seemingly limitless palette of images and information set free from their historical meaning. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

The (2003-2014) BOVINE PORTRAITS IN HEXADECIMAL HUE is a series of large-scale monochromatic oil paintings of cows. The work explores themes of existentialism, vanity and the impact of digital culture on visual experience. Inspiration comes from a wide range of historical portraiture including, but not limited to, the work of Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus, and the spectacularly rendered visions of clergy and wealthy patrons by old masters of the genre such as Rubens and Vermeer.

Each painting begins with a digitally manipulated head shot - a hastily captured image of the subject in their natural habitat, encountered on motorcycle trips throughout the US, but mostly in the lower Hudson Valley. The source image is then stripped of extraneous contextual information and edited in the studio where each image is tinted with a single hue chosen from the 216 colors of the basic Web palette. The titles include the "hex" value of that color, a 6 digit piece of code that tells a computer how it should be displayed.

The individual panels are executed as single self-contained paintings that are created in isolation from the full source image, so every square is essentially an abstract composition of highly detailed nonsense. This was a process that I developed to thwart my tendency towards obsessive rendering - something that interferes with spontaneous mark-making and the "wildness" of painting that I believe is essential to the success of the endeavor.

Initially inspired by a visit to a dairy farm in Buck's County, PA where I was mainly impressed by the size of these creatures, I quickly became captivated the facial "expressions" implied by anatomical idiosyncrasies such as long, luxurious eyelashes and heavy brooding brows that seemed to suggest a wide range of human emotions like fear, tenderness and vulnerability, even anger. Clearly this is projection on my part, one that is often shared by the viewer. But it made me think about how these creatures relate to the genre of portraiture. Historically, portraiture has been largely a tale of the very rich immortalized in self-important displays of wealth and power. In creating these works, I have elevated cattle, a traditional symbol of that wealth, to this same stature. Since embarking upon the project in early 2003, I have completed over 50 Bovine Portraits.

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