I am a visual artist with a poet’s addiction to words. The best metaphor for the method behind my fragmented, nostalgic, neurotic, and humorous paintings and works on paper is writing.
It is impossible to experience my work without referencing reading and the literary narrative, not to mention home décor, suburban fashion, greeting cards, old dictionaries, pop songs, and other culturally mediated subjects. Wet scrawls of confessional writing, garnered from a variety of sources, contradict structured texts, often a dictionary definition or a generic statement, to imply numerous and disparate voices.
Words have the power to illuminate as well as to deceive. I pair the visual with the verbal in order to maximize a painting’s power to contradict itself, mimicking the human brain’s natural thought process.
My method deals directly with the present, where information is spread out in isolated patches and pieced together in the brain. This disjointed world of images and ideas becomes fused through metaphor, contrast, and layering into poetic, rather than discursive, visual narratives. Like a rebus, these visual works are meant to be puzzled out, discerned, dissected, and experienced, but never solved.
