I have always been an intense observer. I am drawn to artwork that asks for my presence through the compelling nature of its construction. Work that slowly unfolds its many layers of meaning through a complex dialogue with form provides a satisfaction that is, for me, unparalleled.

When we look at a representational painting, particularly a still life painting, we are most often invited into a dialogue about the familiar. Still life tells us the story of the life we have or perhaps the life we wish we had. But in most cases the artist takes the familiar and breaks it out of any association of the mundane.

In my current series of paintings I am foregrounding for consideration essential aspects of visual communication that have always been significant in my work. As a painter, I am exploring the manner in which it is possible to communicate through selection of subject, implication of narrative, form relation to subject matter, the range of naturalism to abstraction, scale and its relation to communication, color and perceptual theory, and the presence of the artist’s hand as witnessed in all of these considerations. Further, I am interested in beauty as a rhetorical form. These paintings seek to lure the viewer into their space through their surface accessibility, and with the insistent authority a complicated thing made with integrity, they require the viewers presence. They ask strange and simple questions that connect lived human experience to its translation as a means of engaging larger more profound ideas.

This is a very demanding form of visual communication that expects a great deal of the viewer. I believe the best reward the artist can offer in payment for the generosity of one willing to enter this dialogue is an engagement with meaning.