ARTIST STATEMENT
 
I see the world as being flat, a pre-Magellan’s point of view. I feel in some way that multiple experiences, stories, relationships, etc., all exist and continue to evolve on a flat plane. As a child, I was raised on a steady diet of animal filled stories, events and histories that included Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories” and the “Jungle Book”, yearly Barnum & Bailey’s circus trips, countless natural history TV shows, and hundreds of accounts of shark attacks documented in books I discovered in the library that I’d pour over every week for a few hours waiting for my guitar lessons to start. All of this intertwined with my dramatic and unique upbringing as an only child in Brooklyn. And so this perception of a flat Earth seems to exist because of my mild inability to let memories and experiences fade…good, bad or ugly.

Painting on maps and blueprints has enabled me to literally flatten out a landscape, placing major and minor animal characters that remind me of people, places and things on and even playing field. The work evolves organically, starting off with 2 major characters connected by some undetermined or mysterious relationship. The evolution of the work strives to connect them as they exist on 2 opposite sides of the surface…aching to be together or dying to be further apart. The process of connection creates a dense visual landscape, which includes smaller stories or tributaries feeding off of or flowing into a their destiny.

Characters, objects and visual element repeat from work to work, as I believe they are a finite group characters and relationships that continue to shape my life. However, the telling and retelling of these stories is infinite. At times, final ribbon of color replicates a narrator’s voice, helping to join these pieces within an expanding puzzle.