Other painters describe me as a ‘gritty realist,’ ‘expressive realist’ and ‘painterly realist.’ I believe all the descriptions are apt because my influences and concerns cover both extremes of the figurative tradition. I seek particularity, description and nuance of form, but I also love bold, brusque and vigorous paint handling and execution. I have an abiding commitment to depicting the sensations that produce light and color and to creating visual form and structure. On the other hand, I need to explore content through narrative. Thus, I try to fuse all these various impulses in my paintings and drawings.

My handling and description of form, volume and space explore the tensions between boldness of execution versus particularity and between perception versus invention. My paintings’ surfaces are scarred, rubbed, scratched, scrubbed, scumbled, built, destroyed and rebuilt. I want the marks and paint to create a frenetic and visually thrilling world of events while coalescing into architectonic and monumental form. Furthermore, I desire my rough and raw treatment of paint and form to echo the visceral reactions and mental states of the people depicted in my paintings, with the end result being a fusion between the visual and psychological elements.

My intent is to explore how narrative frameworks and narrative ideas influence each other. Often the main concern in most contemporary narrative painting is how the form of the painting, that is, its narrative framework or structure, conveys the ideas of the story. I am equally interested in how the narrative ideas can express and create aesthetically exciting pictorial frameworks. My paintings give equal importance to the specific ideas expressed in narrative form and to the resultant form and visual structure itself.

See the work.