Trompe l’oeil, fiction, and surrealism are the major influences on my work. When you believe in a trompe l’oeil painting, you are believing in nothing, and when that moment is broken, reality is questioned. This, in part, is the genre’s connection to surrealism. The play between the real and the unreal. Where there is an opportunity to question reality there is also an opportunity for the viewer to question themselves. Fiction plays at this slippage of reality. In a work of fiction, reality is concentrated. It is not naturalistic. All of the boring bits are cut out, and events unfold in rapid succession. What the reader is left with is the occasion to come to new understandings about reality in the work of fiction. The paintings offer the viewer parts that they, in turn, complete with their own experience.