Artist statement

My paintings begin with fragments: a body, a room, an object, a gesture that has somehow become more vivid than the experience it came from. I am interested in how intimacy gets remembered unevenly, how I can forget the sequence of an event but remember a hand, a doorway, a piece of clothing, or the feeling of another body.

I work primarily in oil, moving between figuration and abstraction. Bodies are cropped, enlarged, layered, or allowed to disappear into their surroundings. A thigh, a hand, a fold of skin, or a curve might begin as anatomy and become something harder to name. Through scale, compression, and unresolved edges, I try to keep the image from settling completely, so that recognition remains close to sensation.

Memory does not feel particularly narrative to me. It returns through repetition, omission, distortion, and association, and the paintings follow that structure. Beds, clothing, candles, handcuffs, doors, and handles recur across different works, but I do not think of them as symbols with fixed meanings. They are things I keep returning to. Their meanings accumulate and shift depending on what surrounds them, what has happened since, and what I leave out. Experiences that happened years apart begin to sit next to each other. Something that once felt insignificant can become impossible to stop thinking about.

Desire works similarly. I am drawn to intimacy because it can hold contradictory feelings at the same time: tenderness and control, pleasure and discomfort, wanting to be seen and suddenly becoming aware that you are being looked at. Sometimes the erotic becomes awkward precisely because you become conscious of your own body inside it. I am interested in that interruption, the moment when sensation, self-consciousness, memory, and fantasy stop lining up.

Scale allows me to push that instability further. When a fragment of a body becomes larger than the person standing in front of it, the body can no longer be taken in as a whole. It has to be encountered in pieces. Looking moves between intimacy and scrutiny, attraction and discomfort, recognition and abstraction. In other paintings, the body disappears almost completely and is registered through what remains around it: a bed, an object, a room, evidence that someone was there.

The work is autobiographical, but I am not trying to tell my life in sequence. I am interested instead in what resurfaces and how its meaning changes when it returns. Painting gives me a way to work through that structure physically. Images are revised, covered, distorted, and found again. Earlier decisions remain underneath later ones, sometimes visible and sometimes not, and I rarely know at the beginning what will survive.

What remains is almost never the whole story. Usually it is stranger and more specific than that: a sensation, an embarrassment, a desire, an object, a gesture I cannot stop remembering. I paint those fragments without trying to make them resolve into something cleaner than they were.