Living on the East Coast made me acutely aware of the specific aesthetics of my Midwestern upbringing: a pragmatic, mundane (and rather flat) sense of beauty, stubbornly free of high ideas or refinements of style. Living and working as an artist in Brooklyn and studying at Yale forced me to see and remember my family home and lifestyle in a different light. This tension between my later-acquired, intensely cosmopolitan awareness of art and style, and the working class tastes I grew up with, shapes who I am as a painter. In my paintings I strive to be rigorous in purely formal terms of design, shape, space, and color; my paintings are still, to me, just pictures of home—kitchens, family rooms, neighborhood streets, churches, and farm houses.