artist statement:

I've been drawing since I was a child, and the question that inspires me is still the same: what does it mean? What does a picture actually say about the thing it depicts? Every image carries instructions — about who belongs in the frame, who gets to look, and what looking is supposed to mean. My work is an argument with those instructions. Every subject I paint arrived carrying a history it never chose. That's exactly why I paint it.

In The Original, I observe how painting has spent five centuries looking at women. Looking is not the same as seeing. The women in those paintings were never the object within them — they were the reason each painting existed at all. I don't construct the figure. I encounter her. The painting is a record of that encounter, not an invention of my hand.

In Chroma Cowboys, my instinct turns on American mythology. The same tradition that struggled to see the female figure clearly also decided what colors were allowed to mean. I take the cowboy — America's most mythologized icon — and recast him. The silhouettes stay familiar; the color has other ideas that I didn’t bring to the discussion. Feminine color on a cowboy reads like weakness. The myth never considered that it might be the other way around — or what that assumption was built to protect.

Both series are one argument. In The Original, the female body was assigned a meaning it never chose. In Chroma Cowboys, feminine color was assigned a weakness it never deserved. The paintings work with and against both assignments at once.

For me this didn't start with the figure or the cowboy. Before either had a name, there was Bloom. Look closely enough and the woman was always in there too — in an array of beautiful shapes not quite accurate enough to be considered botanical.

Across all of it — the frontiersmen, the figures, the florals — the method is the same. Rogue color meets economy of mark under an imperfect line. Together the combined effect uses the assumptions it came with but detaches the image from its inherited role in our so-called reality.

These paintings are corrections, not homages. I'm not interested in painting the world as it has been seen. I want the one that got painted over.