A painter who loves to look at people, I am drawn to the intersections between the multiple selves we construct for public and private consumption, what we choose to reveal or hide, and the traces we leave behind. Portraiture is a triangulation between subject-painter-viewer that remains fertile ground for upsetting the equilateral, weighting one angle, then another. Strategies of excision, dissection and reassembly are often employed to investigate possibilities that may variously engage the viewer as customer, server, or as co-creator. My chosen subjects are often friends, and the process one of collaborative play and elaborate staging. Drag performers, magician great uncles, secretaries, and manipulated cadavers all have their moments in the fabric. Narratives, where they emerge, often manifest through code (as in a rather queer Cole Porter song from the thirties) or juxtaposition (macro/micro views of bodies, the home photo-collage format). When exploring juxtapositions of gender, race or sexuality, I do not seek to reify the categories by which we define ourselves, but to, at the very least, blur their edges. I live someplace between the lands of comfort and discomfort – both my own and the viewer’s.
