Painting allows me to cut straight to emotion, and in order to do it I “have to both deny and embrace all…impulses toward romanticism and irony…”, as Amy Sillman describes in Faux Pas. As a genre of art it functions in a zone of liminality, as it has no beginning or end like other time based media. With no introduction or context, the immediacy of experiencing a painting is inherently playful. As an artist, it’s an act of seduction, to communicate multiple points of thought, all at a glance. I enjoy the tension of balancing how layered an image can be. My work stems from an interest in what it looks like before things overflow. The moment when everything is at its most visually opulent, and circulating in one thought pattern, before a climax.

The images I’m layering are based on self-embarrassment, as a way of accessing humor. Like autofiction, I reframe my own thoughts referencing art history, cinema, and literature, to get outside of my internal visual patterns. What does it mean to assess an emotion in a new context, and still not find any closure in the answer? There is no punchline, or tidy conclusion, it’s the poetry of searching and making connections in the process. 

I’ve been continually drawn to European tapestries and Persian/Indian miniatures as a compositional starting point for my work. They remind me of comics, because as images, they are based on many fragmentary moments, but they still add up to make up a larger scene that can ground the viewer. It’s that skillful interweaving of fragments that I’m interested in. The narrative can be abstract as long as the emotion of each moment connects to the next one, because that’s how we fundamentally process the world.