ARTIST STATEMENT

Things I tend to read about and then think a lot about are:

a world full of constant small, brutal wars,
world hunger,
ecological destruction,
political corruption,
religious fanaticism, intolerance, and hatred
greed,
hypocrisy,
genocide,
famine, flood,
the end of civilization
the end of nature,

but that’s not what this work is about. This work is about what I do while I think about all these urgent, global concerns and feel ineffectual and paralyzed. I drink coffee.

I drink a lot of coffee. It1s a constant in my life. I drink it to think. I drink it to comfort. I drink it to celebrate. I drink it to socialize. I drink it to transition from one thing to another. I drink it to kill time.

There are lots of rituals involving coffee. People take possession of their coffee, they have specific brands or brews for different times. Take-out coffee cups piled up in my studios when I was moving out and moving in.

They formed congregations on all the surfaces and became a kind of testament to uncertain stability. This interested me and I started painting them.

In these drawings and paintings, I focus on the remains of that specific, automatic, mundane, contemporary activity. The process is a means of investigating these logo emblazoned, disposable, talismanic objects of our culture.  I wonder if there is any connection between  global issues and our private, automatic behaviors, like drinking coffee, that we engage in while we discuss solutions to these world problems.  Sometimes when I’m overwhelmed it helps to focus on what1s right in front of me, draw it and try to understand what it means.