Painter, drawer, & maker
I paint dynamic and crowded representational collages about human memory and its relationship to nature, technology, digital information, and time. My paintings are painted over a warm-colored ground, which I let peek through the overpainting in select places. I slowly layer paint, gradually masking the color of the ground and building a full scale of value and color in the overpainting.An important part of my creative process is translating digital information into organically painted compositions; I think of myself as a hopelessly imprecise biological printer. I paint from digital collages that I make using images I collect from the internet of biological processes, data visualization (such as maps and diagrams), in addition to photos of the mundane that I take from my immediate life. Some of the subjects of my paintings include: specimen jars, maps, fossils, domestic objects, birds, human hands, and scientific photography. When I compose my paintings, I am inspired by the oversaturation of visual information that comes with a highly optimized and interconnected digital culture; I am interested in layering so much visual information into an individual painting that it begins to obscure itself and loses legibility.
Conceptually central to most of my paintings are anachronistic juxtapositions; I reference both the breadth of geologic time and the narrowness of time in the contemporary, digital world. By painting fossils next to family heirlooms, all collaged over poor quality PNGs that I crudely drag from NIH papers, I want to encourage viewers to consider the differences between geologic time, biological time, and virtual time, and the ways all three overlap within human memory.