Artist Statement
Throughout my transatlantic existence, my creative and pedagogical practice has remained in constant dialogue with place—each new environment absorbed into my sensibility—yet my visual idiom is invariably scaffolded and informed by my intense education in optical awareness, and steeped in the lineage of European painting.
Although my impetus springs from a desire to depict the human condition, pure representation never quenches my inquiry. I pursue instead the archetypal substratum that underlies any figurative surface—those primal impulses and instinctual vectors that shape our being before culture’s veneer is applied. For this reason, I frequently retreat from direct observation, drawing upon memory and imagination to excavate the pre-rational energies at play.
My work orbits the human experience as its nexus, but it is our animal nature—the raw dynamo of instinct—that both anchors us to the earth and propels our behavior. I find these subterranean forces can sometimes articulate themselves more potently through invented animal forms, whose symbolic volatility exposes the unconscious drives we share with all living creatures.
In translating these archetypal currents into visual form, I navigate a dialectic between abstraction and figuration, allowing the image to grow organically until usually the more figurative emerges. Of late, however, I have also embraced the disciplined rigor of reference-based work, cultivating a parallel stream of imagery that is more analytical, realistic, and controlled—a conceptual conduit for the interplay of conscious intention and hidden impulse.
Although my impetus springs from a desire to depict the human condition, pure representation never quenches my inquiry. I pursue instead the archetypal substratum that underlies any figurative surface—those primal impulses and instinctual vectors that shape our being before culture’s veneer is applied. For this reason, I frequently retreat from direct observation, drawing upon memory and imagination to excavate the pre-rational energies at play.
My work orbits the human experience as its nexus, but it is our animal nature—the raw dynamo of instinct—that both anchors us to the earth and propels our behavior. I find these subterranean forces can sometimes articulate themselves more potently through invented animal forms, whose symbolic volatility exposes the unconscious drives we share with all living creatures.
In translating these archetypal currents into visual form, I navigate a dialectic between abstraction and figuration, allowing the image to grow organically until usually the more figurative emerges. Of late, however, I have also embraced the disciplined rigor of reference-based work, cultivating a parallel stream of imagery that is more analytical, realistic, and controlled—a conceptual conduit for the interplay of conscious intention and hidden impulse.