There is a powerful energy that occurs in crowds.  I depict it.  I use hundreds of photographs and digitally montage them into a unified composition.  Once montaged, I render my compositions in airbrushed acrylic.  The blurred, ethereal nature of sprayed paint and multitudinous human features create a crystallographic repetition that causes the retina to vibrate.  Combined with the flat, even application of airbrushed paint, tension is formed between individual and crowd, uniqueness and difference, abstraction and representation.   

In my work, whirls of figures celebrate, mourn, protest, consume, dance, and embrace alongside other figures that drown, burn, and dissolve.  My crowds evoke the power and ecstasy of unified intention alongside a potential descent into mob mentality.  The works recall the utopian pursuit of 1960's psychedelia, van murals, and other airbrush art forms.  Even in illustration and photography, airbrush is often used to idealize.  But in my work, airbrushed paint is like a thin veil that separates utopia and dystopia, civilization and chaos.

My recent black on black paintings are created with varying layers of matte and gloss paints.   The figures may be invisible at first, yielding a black, minimalist plane.  However, portions appear as the viewer walks before the canvas.  These works act akin to memory, forming a crowd and narrative from disparate times and places., based on both rumination and reality.  Depending upon light, time of day, and placement, the figures appear and dissolve, haunting the edge of liminal perception.  These compositions defy an instant read.  The narrative may be revealed to be quite different than upon initial inspection.  By repositioning one’s self physically in relation to the paintings, a corresponding shift in content may also occur.

On one hand, my paintings have a representational, socio-political quality.  On the other hand, they are inspired by light and space works, op art, and abstract field paintings that do not argue for a state of being so much as enact one. When viewed abstractly, they evoke a politic that equals their narrative qualities. By prompting a singular act of engaged looking, they offer a profoundly different experience than a great deal of contemporary life.