I paint real conversations with real people in real time, and I reimagine each setting and include text for the subject matter and the sitter to be known. In each new work I ask: “How can I tell a story that is impossible to tell?” The people I paint are my neighbors, friends and family living in a remote, cold, rural Adirondack community. And despite often being caricatured or ignored in larger cultural conversations, I aim to invite viewers into our moments of quiet tension and connection. Figuration and the painted story allow me to gain a deeper understanding of my experiences with others.

Each work is begun with hastily made on-sight drawings and photographic references and transferred and refined into line drawings on cradled hardwood. The medium, oil paint, is stiffened in a freezer, and the dry thin skins are mixed back into the paint and applied to the substrate in thick clumps that are sensitive to the ways the materials touch, influence, and transform. I work on several paintings at a time both materially and conceptually.

While I am ever interested in the spatial poetry of the generations of painters before me, I am inspired when the boundaries of real life and art dissolve. I think of each painting as a counterforce to the overwhelming sense of invisibility many communities feel when their narratives are told for or taken from them.