I’ve always been interested in painting’s ability to function in multiple states simultaneously, namely as both illusory space and physical surface. While making my work, I am always aware of that dichotomy, and I tend to paint as if a pane of glass were the only thing separating me from what I’m depicting.

The imagery and framing devices in my work reference artists including Giovanni Bellini, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Fra Angelico, and, in particular, the still life paintings of Juan Sánchez Cotán. In his book Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson speaks aptly of Cotán’s early paintings, writing that they “exactly reverse the scale of values in which what is unique and powerful in the world is the preordained object of the gaze, while that which lacks importance is overlooked.” My desire is to push past simple pastiche and to use these references as a means of pointing toward something nonmaterial, something we can grasp at, but that continually evades us.