These new paintings seek aesthetic refuge from the madness of today’s news by offering ways to show the delights of pictorial wonder in a humanistic context. Gently suggested narratives and scenes of home, workplace, and society at large can be my starting point but eventually lead to the more significant formal concerns of pictorial invention, especially those that involve the geometric divisions of space and the interactions of space, color, and shape.

My images gradually emerge from an automatic drawing process of gestural marks and erasures that then selectively refine and solidify these apparitions into a composition structure.

Recent sources of inspiration come out of a “mashup” of disparate sources, such as mixing the obsessive patterns of Édouard Vuillard with those of Paul Klee and Mark Tobey, as well as improvising on the expressive figurative powers of Max Beckmann, Paula Rego, and Stanley Spencer. Another primary source of visual delight comes from my love of Mexican folk art, ancient terracotta figurines, Indian miniatures, and early modernist sculpture.