I utilize a painting’s ability to transport an audience to a place where they have never been, or to enhance their understanding of a place with which they are already familiar. My works draw on my personal experience of built environments, as well as their forms and details, to compose abbreviated relationships that convey the character of specific establishments. Nostalgia is evidenced not only in architecture as a whole, but also in the deterioration and scarification of the details of a building. The places portrayed in my paintings are enriched by the totality of their histories including their soot, polish, cracks, and patches. My goal through painting is twofold: to please the eye of the beholder through balance/imbalance of form, color and texture, and to challenge recognition by piecing details together in such a way as to require the audience members to search the rolodex of images in their minds, and place themselves within the context of their own personal understandings of my experience.

My work process is a relationship between the execution of decisions and concessions made to the nature of the materials. Informed by my studies of space, atmosphere, architecture and maps, I decompose and divide the subject and its parts and reassemble them in a way that allows them to complement each other. Constantly battling the pursuit of perfection and clinical sterility, I prefer pronounced texture, natural lines, and uneven color in the context of refined, graphic compositions. I draw from metaphors of shape and geometry to create balanced, yet asymmetrical compositions, and am consumed by accidents, chance, and calculated attempts to control.

Ultimately, my paintings are a private collaboration amongst the materials, the audience and myself. My works are devised to evoke feelings of familiarity among audience members through imagery obtained from publicly accessible views of specific locations. The paintings are puzzles whose answers will not be obvious to everyone, but whose compositions may inspire a more thorough examination of our personal haunts. Los Angeles is a dark city, which bears a feeling of regret for lost time and fleeting history, while it blindly runs towards the anonymity of contemporary culture. Having a strong history in Los Angeles, I have often wondered if it is possible for a city such as this, saturated with a population indifferent to or unfamiliar with our founding culture, to maintain and nurture its historical character. I hope my paintings may kindle feelings of pride in the audience for their participation in the living history of a monumental town.