I am a collector. Of ideas, of thoughts, of phrases and words. But foremost, I am a collector of images. I am a merchant. I deal in the trade of information. I display my wares as collages of all that I have collected. I translate my intake, filtering and focusing it in order to manifest unique visions of our world: past and present, physical and imagined, recorded on a canvas or board, frozen in time, yet peering into the future.
These visions have manifested themselves as collages of marks, both invented and appropriated. I evoke the aesthetics of decay, creating intensely layered, heavily processed surfaces rendered in the natural palette of landscape, yet cut with graphic imagery referencing the manmade symbology of advertising and architecture. By degrading the polished aesthetics of modernity, I suggest a fragility underlying the bold confidence of contemporary society. My visual references to conflict, to war in particular, connote its role in societal decay. My work is imbued with a certain fatalism, an obsessive fear of an apocalyptic trajectory.
My process is characterized by a specific dichotomy, one between order and chaos. I swing back and forth between sporadic strokes that refer to the natural, and controlled marks that refer to the manmade. The organizing nature of the graphic marks is rendered futile, overcome by the haze of painterly marks. With the decay of the graphic elements, the human images, I question their permanence. Further, I champion the eternality of the natural world, even absent of humanity.
Through my mark making, my process of layering, my selective veiling and unmasking, my images become windows into a future past. The ghosts of humanity are burned onto the surface like nuclear shadows. American stars are faded, like once bright leaves succumbed to autumn’s pull. Splashes of paint are drops of blood, scratches of paint are piles of rubble. Once discernable images fade into a polluted haze. Through my process, through my image and compositional selections, I evoke the natural decay of the ages. But further, I suggest that our current societal trajectory is drastically accelerating its pace.