Collectors tend to refer to my works as paintings—and from across the room, that is exactly how they appear.

Up close, however, it becomes clear that they are actually photographic prints heavily textured with paint. At a normal viewing distance, this creates a sustained visual tension, with one collector describing the experience as “intoxicating.” (Evidently, she thinks my art is dope.) The natural question people have is where the printed image comes from.

Very specifically, it comes from a photograph of painted marks that I made on a canvas. So, it is a  photograph of a painting?  Yes, and that doesn't really convey the whole story. 

I do not photograph the paint to make a record of some seemingly beautiful art piece that I think I've made. I photograph it to see if it can become a beautiful art piece that I will make. Basically, I treat that initial canvas as raw material for photographic inquiry.  Taking the image into a digital environment allows me to deconstruct its visual essence.  In many cases, the final printed image does not resemble the scene from which it came—painted marks that would never be thought of as  a "painting." Other times, there is a clear painterly gesture and I want to intensify its visual affect.

A photograph is often understood as serving as documentation of a historical moment—it was like that. My digital files are certainly photographic images, but they aren't just typical reference documents of the past. Instead of strictly recording a historical moment in the studio, they act as proleptic blueprints for their own materiality! Honestly, this ontological irregularity is very amusing to me...

My initial "painting" doesn't exist for very long.  I wipe it away almost immediately after I photograph it to form the base of the next set of marks.  My final "painting" and its digital image are remnants more than reflections.

My work begins and ends with physical paint, but digital photography is the alchemy that not only makes the work possible, but transforms what occasionally could be described as  a hot mess of pigment on palette into a literal drug event for some.  No matter what, for each of my collectors, my practice produces 1/1 unique mixed-media material artifacts using the language of contemporary abstraction.