Growing up with an eccentric father whose obsession of building spaceships out of scrap metal in the yard, often led to disastrous results. Our family moved again and again, always one step ahead of trouble. Setting the field on fire with a careless blow torch or finding that our TV had been pawned for sheet aluminum was not uncommon. My intimate faux-naive paintings invite viewers to stop and move closer. Images of derelict cars in patchwork fields, and figures rendered in foil in front of neglected suburban homes depict a quirky Texas childhood. My work has been about telling stories of the uncanny. For me, life has been the simultaneous humor and dysfunction, the banal struggle to pay bills and the visionary ambition to change the future. As an artist, I feel the responsibility to ask what I can do to empower my daughter, my students, and those who experience my work. The value of memory is the awareness that one can reform the present. I make work that raises discussion and allows for transcendence beyond the centered self.