Every painting is a life with a history, full of stories, memories, made of moments, emotion, adventure, experiments, breakthroughs and mistakes. These events leave impressions on the life of the painting and are the layers that I have made ever so important to my artistic process. My canvases are often filled from edge to edge with clues and glimpses into the paintings’ own history and life. This is the impression of the art that reflects myself and the way I have approached my own journey. I have always been better at fixing mistakes than doing things right the first time. Planning is not part of my process; I seem to find comfort in the mystery of the things that are out of my control.
My art is a process of acting, reacting, feeling, and thinking. I attempt to act with confidence and faith that when the gesture is honest and executed in the spirit of truth, it will reflect those same values which I feel hold an undeniably unique beauty. I react to the unplanned complications that an emotionally driven action can do to the compositional integrity of the artwork, even though is will prove to be essential to breathing soul into a painting, eventually. Painting is often about being in a moment. The painting is your documentation of a conversation with time.
These layers are crucial to my work and I feel create visual complexity and depth. Every layer contributes to the completeness of the work. It is my choice to determine which parts of each layer to leave exposed and use to contribute to the overall composition. This is like choosing the parts of your life, the moments, good or bad, that you find value in to guide your decision making and represent the person you are to the world.
Every painting has a life composed of these layers, and every painting will reveal the truths discovered in its life. The emotional layers of my work are where you will witness wild, expressive gestures, seemingly carelessly rolled color fields, splashes, and drips. The use of vibrant colors pay tribute to a background in street art as well as an attachment to the simple honesty of adolescence. These layers are usually applied with oil stick, spray paint, and latex using paint rollers, water guns, squirt bottles, and squeegees. There are also more cerebral layers that will consist of painted objects, either abstracted or representational, deliberate lines or patterns, and a reductive washing out process of isolating, marrying, and bringing a certain cohesiveness to previous layers.
The destiny of humanity is to love and appreciate beauty. Our complex brains allow abstract reasoning, development of language, introspection, problem solving and culture through social learning. If we are removed from the equation, the sun would still rise, the moon and stars would still twinkle and glisten from still water, the snow-capped mountain would still stand in all its glory, the flowers would still bloom, and life would still flourish. We call these things "beautiful", and in turn give them meaning, as they give us life. This brain that allows us to acknowledge beauty embodies a desire to understand and influence our world, so we create and evolve, which allows beauty to take on new forms. The responsibility of the artist is to observe and translate this human gift of perception into a language, regulate the flow of this transformation, and nominate new beauties into the collective consciousness.