I paint my own tension. In other words, I work from the body itself because I feel it as a semi-contained, hesitantly expanding vessel. Having recently moved to Philadelphia to pursue my MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, I am actively beginning research on the body as a point of fusion, or a crossroads at which choice begins.
The human being itself, a container of both life and death, simultaneously becomes the common object of exchange and the subject of enunciation. In this way, there is a definite struggle and hopefully a compromise in the discernment and realization of integration. I am always pursuing the tension between movement and stasis in the human body; my work discloses the belief that this controversy between movement and stasis is reconcilable through a sort of surrender. However, surrender is difficult for us to allow.
The postures and paint application of my figures are concurrently aggressive yet sensitive. Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon have affected my work in their existential and claustrophobic expressions of the raw human body in confined, mundane quarters. The truncated torsos and limbs of Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys are important to my work, and Susan Rothenberg's investigation of the form emerging from a textured field has been crucial; not to mention Lucio Fontana's holes and this list goes on.
On the one hand, the Dasein series (2007) and Trials series (2008) deal with tangibility either by way of the highly textured and richly colored paint and found objects of the Dasein series or the relief effect of the Trials series. On the other hand, the paintings deal with vacuum space, exposing certain areas of raw canvas. There is a constant conflict between these two aspects, and the bleeding that occurs between the two represents this.
The subject matter of my work simply reflects my own experience. Many of my past and current images are unsettling and suggestive of danger. I see my work evolving toward communication of a more confident agency. Man is, as far as we know, the only being capable of self-reflection and, therefore, choice. My work concurrently looks at the human being's potential as an intermediary of life and also his fearful recession from that potential. I see the recession as a tendency toward stasis and the potential as a capacity for creation.