My work centers on the face and body as witness. Emerging from years of large narrative paintings, allegory, mythology, and struggle. After the pandemic, the closing of my art school, flooding, and multiple losses, the work stopped. My hand was a foreign appendage. The way back came through faces.

Pareidolia is seeing faces in everything. Some people see everything in faces. Since childhood I have been drawing faces. Perhaps they were mirrors or personas to accompany and witness what was too big to hold alone.

 These recent paintings are smaller and more compressed than the earlier narratives but they carry the same force. The faces emerge from dark fields. Quiet and stoic but charged. They are revealed through imprimatura, and a subtractive process that exposes the light of the canvas.

 A series on Nazi eugenics grew from my studies of cultural facial features and how they were measured and categorized. Charcoal portraits were discovered in concentration camps testify to the human instinct to bear witness. I created charcoal portraits of family members. Adhesive dots and plumb lines mark vellum overlays. The beloved person becomes a specimen. As an instructor of portraiture, I feel implicated. 

Technology has opened a new thread into the inquiry of identity. Who or what bears witness and how reliable is it.? Technology, AI, memory, loved ones. Where do we see our reflection and is it accurate? Still working subtractively primarily in charcoal I remove what isn't to reveal images of unstable faces and bodies, influenced by ai and filters that have produced chillingly homogenized and hallucinated reflections of my rare childhood photographs. This inquiry is driving my current studio practice.

 Narrative is beginning to re-enter through unresolved work.  Narrative art gives form to true stories in a way that is palatable. Critic Maurice Taplinger called me “a convincing conjurer of dark personal myth.” Even when the work shifts from allegory to the cropped face, that is a through line. One can’t crop out of that.