Tactility has always played a important role in my work. The very idea that people cannot or should not touch a work of art instinctively makes me want to create surfaces and textures which cry out to be experienced through touch.
Increasingly, I have explored cartography and navigation as themes. I grew up with maps; I learned to read maps alongside learning to read words, and so the idea of image as its own narrative (both literary and physical) is very natural to me. I see the current work as having this feel; like aerial photography, satellite imagery or flight charts. Paint, when subjected to visceral and at times violent application, takes on a physicality and topography which I find fascinating. The process I’m working with right now involves tremendously thick impasto and the subsequent removing of it, augmented by the heavy use of painting mediums. I am stating and negating; I am building up and ripping away.
The results are similar to a relief map, and create a visual record of both the journey as well as process. It is my hope that these may indeed be maps to collective, even unknown destinations, and that the viewer can also become the traveler.
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