My own studio, family, and neighborhood are the primary subjects of this most recent group of paintings, collectively titled Studio Pictures.
I aspire to a form of autobiography that allows for not only the concrete facts of the everyday (the details of my studio, the people and world around me) but also the improvisational elements of intrusive thoughts, memories, myths, and metaphors.
Figurative painting is well-suited to giving visibility to both the material and immaterial; while the setting of these paintings is my studio and home, my long gone great-grandfather – whose disappearance and subsequent half-century of institutionalization I am currently working to uncover after a hundred years of invisibility – frequently appears. Unsettling ancestral narratives have long been a generative force in my work, and these paintings are part of a larger inquiry into how to both paint and ultimately discuss difficult stories. I might clumsily say these are paintings of me in my studio thinking about what I am thinking about in my studio.