I keep returning to scenes of quiet moments between actions: awareness, reflection, voyeurism, allusive intimacy. Each series of paintings grows first from a title, individual works developed in unison around an evocation of place and conflict. The young men centered in this inherent narrative structure, often alone and lost in thought, exist in environments whose character imparts both detailed history and uncertainty to the figures they surround.

In the idiosyncrasies of each friend and acquaintance who sits for my paintings I find fresh nuance in this late adolescent figure who is, for me, a key into the weighted emotion surrounding a tenuous future. I am drawn to themes of ambiguity, intimacy, and opportunity––foundational piers of my early queer sensibility. What goes unseen? What expectations are created by context? What comes next? What does realization look like? Who will notice? My work celebrates the unmediated, vulnerable softness found in this reckoning of portent and optimism.