My work strives for the luminous and intimate quality of small Flemish paintings. While realistic and informed by the history of painting, my paintings also work to manipulate conventions and challenge reality. I endeavor to place mundane artifacts in the same spiritual frame as an icon or religious scene, and create constellations of surrounding details that can float up to consciousness or assert themselves in the periphery of vision. This experience violates the pictorial hierarchy that the centralized framing of subject matter, like our selective awareness of the world, tries to impose upon reality. In conjunction with enigmatic perspectives and abstract passages that emerge out of objectively depicted materials, I try to paint the elusive-obviousness of reality.