My art is about my life. Although life is often filled with hardship, my work reminds me to look for the beauty in everyday life and allows me to deal with my everyday life, shedding new light on it. I am always looking for the simple, quiet beauty that surrounds me every day and how it is so very important to who I am.
Although my focus is on portraiture and figurative work, I place the figure in a “real” world that is every bit as important to the work as the figure itself. I carefully plan the importance of the environment and subject’s relationship to it. I choose my subject and setting to meet two goals: they must reflect some aspect of my life, while being open-ended enough to speak to the viewer in an individualized way.
Composition is always a powerful element in my work, but it is the challenge to place the figure into a real space that is interesting, as well as an important part of the composition and narrative that drives me. I want to not only show the human element of life but also the environment that makes that element unique and grounded in its own reality. Although I am exploring the dynamics of what it means to be human: relationships, self-awareness, our impact on our surroundings, and our surroundings’ impact on us, it is the ability of certain images to mean so many different things to so many different people that is so intriguing. I am building an implied narrative with the possibility for an interesting story from nothing more than the simple combination of the human element and its environment. It is the mystery of the narrative that allows the viewer to set their own mood, ask their own questions, and draw their own conclusions. A single image can provide warmth to one viewer while chilling another. My work does not provide answers, it provides the opportunity for questions. It is these questions that force us to explore our imaginations and consider our private selves, as individuals and as part of life.
