“I’m painting, I’m painting again.  I’m cleaning... cleaning my brain.”

                                                                -David Byrne (Talking Heads), lyric from “For Artists Only”

Simply put, my paintings are a response to living; another way to take in the experience of being here and an attempt to understand,

describe or communicate something about it. Working on the paintings becomes a kind of sorting, sifting and eventual distillation of whatever

I’m reading, feeling, watching, listening to, looking at or thinking about.

In my work I try to invoke a resonance within the viewer, not dictate a prescribed response or tell a specific story.  Each painting is the end

result of one train of thought (mine) given shape to provide a springboard for a second train of thought, that of the viewer.

I approach each piece directly, without preliminary sketches and with no pre-conceived notion of the final image.  When I’m fully absorbed in

the studio, the act of painting becomes a means of thinking out loud, mapping a progression of thoughts redefined as images, repeatedly

realized and rejected, illustrated and erased. In the subsequent accumulation of ideas and scarification of the surface vestiges of previous

incarnations of the piece remain, altered and obscured but still vital and present - like memories or dreams.

When I’m doing it well, occasionally the work extends beyond me to the collective experience of being here.  

That’s when a piece really resonates, when it raises a mysterious spark of (recognition? potential meaning?) in a stranger.