My objective is to make powerful, expressive, and critically engaged paintings that highlight the materiality of paint and the creative process without relying on expressionist marks and the tropes of twentieth century Expressionism.

In order to achieve this I rely on photography and photo-based strategies to make paintings about painting. Sources for these paintings are photographs of curtains and veils. These subjects simultaneously cover and conceal (like paint) while they expose and reveal (like photography). My photographic sources are manipulated digitally and then used to make stencils for the paintings. In the finished works the thickness of the paint foregrounds the flatness of the surface and the materiality of the paint. The color choices and stenciled shapes allude to the illuminated volumes, shadows, and spaces of their sources.

Emphasizing the forms and gestures of Expressionism (as so many contemporary painters do) compromises the critical range of painting by evoking the emotional/psychological dynamics of modernist practice. Our modernist past is still present in these paintings, but not on the terms of Expressionism. Instead, ontological questions about the nature of paint’s plasticity and elasticity are re-examined with an eye toward the critical dynamics of early modernist invention at the expense of all types of modernist Expressionism.