I am a collector, a scavenger and a pack rat. In constructing my still lifes I work with found objects and then augment with specific chosen objects. The resulting still life contains an implied narrative, a story, an idea, or a mystery that I have felt in that particular assemblage. The types of still lifes I create are complex ways of trying to express physically the ideas in my head. I am fascinated with objects that seem partially destroyed or at least heavily patinated due to a secret, tragic life they have lived.

The paragraph below provides the best equivalent of my process
of ideation:

It is summer. You lie on your stomach on a dock made of wood planks. Baked by the sun, half-conscious you stare with your eyes unfocused through the gaps in the planks into the water below. While in your dreamlike state a piece of flotsam floats into view. For one brief moment it startles your eyes into focus, but your mind is still untethered. In that instant, the object, the water, and your own reflection on the surface combine. Simultaneously, you recall vague past experiences and foreshadow future ones. But then the object floats out of view. Your eyes lose their focus. You now slip back into semi- consciousness. Even so, now all your visions are affected if only peripherally by that single moment of perceived clarity.

The fabric backgrounds in my paintings act as the ethereal subconscious framework supporting and informing the momentary meaning of the object. This meaning can be terribly unstable. Painting is my way to fix it into existence. Once I begin painting I do so from life. While I investigate the objects, they tell me stories they know I want to hear. But they also tell me things I don’t know. By the time I have finished a painting, the original ideas I saw in the collection of objects have become transformed by all the new perceptions I have experienced. Instead of fixing the original meaning—time, experience and method allow for only the very last conceptions of its meaning to remain in the painting. The resulting painted still life then becomes an entirely new object that exists contemporaneously.

My method of painting involves layer upon layer of attempts to negotiate the gap between the real and the perceived and/or ideal. In doing so each layer becomes a chance to perfect by fractional degrees the painted image. This perfection is of course unattainable not only because the idea of this image exists only in my mind but also because it shifts constantly through experience. So I use other methodologies to imply perfection. These involve sanding surfaces to near mirror finish, using framing as a device to render the piece sacred, and sometimes attempting to obscure all traces of brushwork.

It is in the process of recording, altering and observing over long periods of time that meaning emerges in the work. Through the compression of months of minute observations and adjustments onto one surface the surreal quality of the experience becomes evident, transforming the painting from an exercise in observation-based study to a vehicle for ideas and experience.