I work with photographs I’ve taken, looking for transient places and things that are simple, boring or have a low level of information. I’m interested in how we read images, how little is enough to be legible, how a darkening of sky can evoke both weather and flashbulb. By using cultural inventions (horizons, perspective, landscape, still life) I can work toward this. By using paint, I can give those side-glances a moment of slow attention. By using photography I can catch them.
If you look at a highway rendered in paint, you’ve moved the experience (of leaving, of arriving, of waiting with its inherent anxiety, of listening to rock on tape) into a fragment on a wall with an entirely different set of criteria. I try to balance the subject matter, the choice of medium, scale, and the photographic source with equal attention and hope that the sum strikes an emotional chord with the viewer.
It’s noisy in the world and that noise, all the information that constantly infects us, shortens our attention span. In painting I can do something to slow it down, edit out, look for the permanence in the transitory, which is really about hope.
