Statement

My work centers on figurative painting. While my early work consisted of large scale narrative and allegorical work influenced by my passion for art history, I have distilled my subject to primarily faces, approached as sites of presence rather than likeness. Working with restrained, layered paint  and subtractive marks, I reveal the luminosity of the canvas. prioritising structure, pressure, and immediacy over narrative description. These paintings and drawings hold tension through economy, allowing ambiguity and intensity to coexist without full resolution. I have evolved the focus toward the human form, treating faces and figures as sites of psychological presence.  Even the pure abstractions are full of body and gesture. The recent faces are psychological presences being revealed luminoscity through darkness. My play with use of alternative tools has allowed me  to work more physically and expressively. Using tools rather than brushes, the materiality has allowed me to use my body and express my hand. Whether it's my new charcoal vellum overlays, exploring themes of racial profiling, or pychological presences, or my mysterious stories, I try to explore what writer Maurice Taplinger decribed in my work as the

"epic quality..investing the canvas with its own peculiar poetry as a convincing conjurer of dark personal myths."