am interested in images, how something seemingly mundane can become iconic, how we remember and process images, and how far removed an iconic image can be from its source.
This is both a cultural and a personal phenomenon, and I want to explore the connections between images that we are all familiar with and those that are more like private epiphanies.
Drawing and painting are a way for me to discover layers of meaning in a certain image, and also to add layers of meaning to it. I’m not trying to make sense of what I find, it’s more like play. A painting of me going to a ninth-grade dance in 1982 can be funny, nostalgic, or simply remind one of all the boring snapshots one has seen, or taken, or been in.
Memory, poetry, dreams, all of these have layers and associations that are non-linear.
I try to create images that have this type of evocative power and flexibility.
My paintings also seem to have their roots deep in the soil of Americana. Growing up here in the seventies, I absorbed the country’s bi-polarity, its pride and its shame.
The fears of childhood evolved into the anxieties of teen-age and the world outside seemed ever poised on the brink of madness.
And through it all I looked to the west. From my home in New England, I looked to California, a goldmine of dreams and icons. My paintings are, for me, a kind of mental cross-country journey, images of images, dreams of dreams.
