As a child, I spent most of my time alone, wandering through scrub forests and the lengthy open fields created by communication towers through empty sub-rural spaces. I never grew tired of creating fantastic loci of this transitory wilderness. My father was what I call a rogue house-builder. On ten acres of land perched above a housing project he built and built. Slowly, the dilapidated trailers morphed into two story houses with turrets and pyramids perfectly aligned to the four directions, hobbit houses sprung up from the red clay, and shacks emerged from the woods. These early creative constructions and phantasmagorical places have formed my dreams as an adult.
I wanted to be a photographer. Still, I love to capture an experience, to give it the phenomenal character of my imagination. I decided to be a painter when I met Kristin Calabrese, my visiting professor in university. She makes enormous psychological beloved paintings that embrace a sort of mythic socialogical-scanning photo-realism. She pressed me to be generous with my image-making. It was the best lesson I could have gotten.
My paintings take spaces I have photographed and make them the extraordinary experiences. The places and memories I have gathered in my travels become otherworldly memories to be shared and expanded upon with the viewer. They are invitations to think beyond our pragmatic confines and to live life with credulous eyes.
