I'm interested in obscured communication: symbols, hidden meanings, ambiguous gestures, misinterpretation. I'm interested in mystery, fear, and awe we encounter as we try to make sense of "our place in the world." My work is about these searches for meaning, place, and understanding. The search is rendered quite literally as a journey through strange landscapes.
I primarily locate myself in the European-American Romantic landscape tradition. While all paintings including romantic landscapes certainly do "tell stories," I also draw inspiration from formats and traditions that are much more direct and overt about storytelling and communicating information, such as 16th century German illustrated news broadsheets, American comics (especially Silver Age-era, Kirby and the like), ex-voto paintings, and esoteric and Hermetic art.
Working small (usually 5 inches or less in any dimension, and often circular), the paintings resemble tiny windows, peep-holes, or views through telescope lenses. I like how working small can encourage both intimacy (the paintings are only about as wide as our eyes are far apart) and distance (reducing one's ability to see only a tiny portion of a distant scene) with the viewer.
Each painting is accompanied by a micro-story about what is happening (or has happened, or might happen) in the painted scene. I usually come up with the stories after the painting is finished or when it's almost finished. But the stories certainly don't need to be definitive. You can make up your own stories. But the idea of the paintings being connected to a larger story is very important to me: it connects them to an immense imaginary world that I keep exploring.