My paintings depict imaginary spaces that intertwine autobiographical elements with references to history, science fiction and mythology, as a way of exploring the themes of memory, fantasy and the passage of time. I am particularly interested in the way one’s current state can distort our perception of the past, and influence our visions of the future.
My goal is to create paintings that exist in a space outside of time – an imagined world that lies somewhere between a past that never actually happened and a future that never quite panned out as hoped. Instead of constructing a closed-off narrative with a particular message, I’m trying to create moments of uncertainty, whereby the different elements in the painting, while existing within the same space, don’t necessarily always fit logically together, be it in terms of scale, chronology, or even basic physics. These gaps in meaning create a kind of opening that allows the viewer to access the work and interpret it on their own terms.
My paintings are shaped by the internal logic of each individual piece – free association, narrative context and formal concerns dictate the direction in which a particular piece evolves, often arriving at a result that is drastically different from the initial idea. The sources for my paintings are usually found images that attract me for some intangible reason – a certain mood, a light, or a particular setting. Through a series of small studies, and then subsequently through prolonged periods of work on a bigger canvas, the images gradually take on a life of their own, and a composition that may be quite different from the initial source material begins to emerge. In my mind, these gradual transformations, combined with the irrationality and capriciousness that the painting process entails have certain similarities to the way we relate to our past and our future, in gradually creating fantastical constructs that are only tenuously connected to the reality we inhabit.
While the themes in my work ultimately stem from my personal interests and experiences, I think they may on some level also be relevant in the increasingly atomized society we live in today, as growing numbers of people attempt to re-imagine or mythologize their past, or promote utopian or dystopian visions of the future as an over-simplified way of dealing with the complexities of the modern world.