And how are you today?
Feeling good! Anxious to get into the studio today as I have a group show coming up in ...
That's exciting!
So, like a good internet stranger, I've been googling you the past few minutes and looking at your work
Ha! I think about this often... What is the identity that I project on the internet.. It's such a part of our contemporary culture
Absolutely. Often people will just cycle through someone's work in seconds on instagram or a website and immediately create an idea of who the artist is.
Yes!
I think that is so fascinating and terrifying
And what's your take away?
I get this sense of mystery from a lot of the painting, like you are trying to show me something but then immediately cover it up so I can't really see it. It's making me uneasy (in the good "art" way)
That is interesting.
I can relate to that in my older, more abstract work.
Yes, I definitely see that more on the pieces from 2017.
But a mysterious solitude remains in the newer pieces as well.
I came from a place of pure abstraction for sure, and in a way I felt like it was leading to something else.
I try to keep a level of abstraction in my figurative work. I feel that a good image is both abstract and figural… It has been a process of uncovering, in a way.
The journey is a part of my work. The process of an image and the development of a body of work
I'm interested in self discovery. So your reading on the 2017 works feel right.
Yes! I love winning at "understanding art".
Nice job! Ha! I feel like the work never lies, even if I can't see it at first
In some of your newer works there seems to be a bit of a mystical nature theme. Again some menacing figures and maybe some religious allegory.
What took you there?
Looking at the work of Old Masters like Goya, Rubens, and El Greco
Seeing there subject matter and studying their pictorial narratives as well
I can guess that some of those masters also influenced your Hell and Garden paintings
What draws you to study those places?
On your "Eden study" paintings there is also a sense of menace, which is not something typically seen in conventional depictions of the Garden of Eden.
I'm interested in the drama of the paintings, for example: The Fall of the Damned by Rubens.
The violence, the sexual undertone of the violence in that image. The idea of the fallen and how one can fall from the graces of power or the moral structure set up by one's time and society.
The color and really the action within the painting. The figures are so active within the image.
I was also falling out of a long term relationship so I think in some way that fed into that whole attraction to the image