The work here is entirely self-taught over the course of five years. The early drawings have a deeply personal and tender quality which may tend to obscure the ideas within. Lately I have been sifting through my drawings from 2020-2023 to understand their fundamental concepts, so I can begin to work exclusively in these terms.

My work generally deals with the dialectical relationship between image and surrounding. I search for meaning not in images themselves, but in the structural arrangement of their attachments. Many of my pieces express an inversion of frame and content, and I believe this is part of why they appear so tense and constrained. There is considerable tension at this moment of collision, the crowded boundary of an empty silhouette.

In the early work I would create large fields of texture through meticulous stippling and hatching. From fields of texture I moved briefly to fields of symbolic objects, and nowadays I focus primarily on fields of color. These fields of color are usually populated by silhouette-images, eggs, or a combination of the two. In my mind the eggs can can also function as images in themselves, but only if they have an outline which distinguishes the egg-subject from its surrounding field. I have also found that for the purposes of my work, no two images can coexist on a single picture plane - this is why these egg-images (“liberation eggs”, as I call them) are always depicted as singular subjects, and often titled after people/imaginary characters.

While I generally group things based on intuition, I do think the distinction between painting and drawing has more to do with the idea of the outline than materials or technique. With the drawings I try to emphasize the outline, treating image and surrounding as separate objects entirely. The paintings on the other hand are more integrated: even the most visceral color boundaries lend themselves to an expression of difficult, rigid totality.

The entire body of work has dealt with themes and images from my childhood, the memory of which can be rather complicated and troubling. The use of childhood symbols was more overt in the early work, in a way that seemed to grow more fraught with each successive piece. The early works were extremely labor intensive and exhausting, and much of their meaning rested on the observer’s willingness to patiently engage. After several years of drawing that way, the work aroused so much personal difficulty that it became too painful for me to continue.

Lately I’ve been tending more towards total abstraction, reducing ideas down and scaling pieces up. The recent works appear precarious to me as well, but they also seem to express something new: a serene and hopeless knowing. There is an important truth that circumscribes this experience, like an outline of blinding memory: once an egg has hatched, it can never be returned.