When I was a child, I believed there was a big Book of Truth in the sky. I had no access to it. For nearly thirty years, making and teaching art has been my way of looking for what is true and becoming the author of my own truth—quite literally excavating light from fields of darkness in charcoal and paint.

I make paintings and drawings from lived experience, true stories, observation, memory, art history, technology, and mythology. The work has moved from large multi-figure narratives to psychologically charged faces, abstracted bodies, creatures, environments, and most recently, charcoal drawings based on my discovery of AI hallucinations. A true story may remain recognizable or become allegory, symbol, or “dark personal myth.” Decades of making, teaching, museum leadership, and immersion in art history and contemporary art have created a subconscious archive—a chorus of visual voices that enters the work, invited or not.

While in my early work I used mostly imagined and invented figures and worlds, now, even if I do have a reference, at times I will go into a strange hypnotic flow or dream state where I am working automatically. It is the feeling of leaving and returning. When I come to there is sometimes a completely unrealized presence that has little resemblance to the reference. At times it feels like me; other times I feel as though I am pulling from a deep internal archive of facial memory. 

I work subtractively, wiping out, erasing, lifting, at times using alternative tools to reveal light and form. I remove what is not to reveal what is, sometimes releasing a presence that seemed to wait in the canvas. Years of teaching observational drawing have reinforced close looking as a way of testing perception: comparing what we think we see with what is actually there.

That search has taken different forms. Narrative paintings transform lived experience into visual stories. Beauty Myths examines the cultural ideas of beauty. Self-portraits allowed me to study the unfamiliar presence of my own visage; the abstract work carried the gesture and layering of branching and planar forms through building and scraping down. My eugenics drawings place family faces beneath systems once used to measure and classify Jewish features. Most recently, discovering AI hallucinations of my own images, often through art historical filters, has extended the inquiry into perception, memory, misrecognition, and what we accept as real.

We never actually see our own face. We know ourselves through mirrors, photographs, memory, other people, culture, and increasingly through digital systems. Photos distort, others misunderstand or project themselves, the mirror is tainted by dysmorphia, and AI completely hallucinates a plausible but often homogenized self. Each is a fallible witness. My work asks: Who gets to witness us? What do they see? What is accepted as true? How are we understood and reflected as selves and as culture? Painting and drawing allow me to question those reflections, bear witness to lived experience, and continue to question and author my own truth.