STATEMENT

I use my artwork as a way of making personal records of my existence and of those around me. In my work, most often oil painting, I find capturing a personality to be much more important than proper rendering. My goal is to find what features, postures, and facial expressions make each body its own. I focus on representing only specific features correctly to capture character. In painting, rendering is more important to me than in printmaking, where I enjoy exaggerating features to a point at which individuals become caricatures.

Alice Neel is the artist who has had the greatest influence on my work. A self-described humanist, she described "life" to be the theme of her work. She believed that by capturing an individual at a certain moment, she was capturing the spirit of an era: "The face is the center of the senses. Life, history, the environment shows. Everything." I strive to focus my work so that I too can provide evidence of all these things—people, relationships, communities, and movements of a certain time.