Paintings

Although I’ve enjoyed drawing for as long as I can remember and occasionally dabbled in painting, it wasn’t until the pandemic years of COVID-19 that I first embraced it as a practice. My journey began with a large (for me) acrylic, on a 25” x 24” canvas: a still life of cheekily altered gym shorts, held aloft in front of a white wall, from just off frame.

Feeling more confident with the completion of that painting, I decided to take the leap to the more challenging medium of oils, starting with a series of 12” x 12” canvases. With no formal training in oil painting, I try to approach each canvas with a Beginner’s Mind, allowing my curiosity and intuition to guide me. This lack of technical constraint has given me a sense of freedom to experiment; I accept the imperfections of my hand as part of the process. Rather than striving for exact photographic realism, I let the inevitable distortions reflect my own subjectivity—the nature of memory itself.

My paintings are deeply personal, drawn from the visual archive of my life—typically cropped from my own photographs. These moments include my partner and me at a gay bar in Silverlake, years before we started dating; my beloved Shih Tzu, Olive; the two of them walking down a Brooklyn street; a pair of startled deer caught in the headlights on a country road near my childhood Indiana home; a revelatory first encounter with the sublime fast-food culture of Southern California. Each piece holds a memory, filtered through my perspective, and rendered in paint.