Recent Painting / Printmaking
My painting and printmaking practice is essentially large scale collage on surfaces including wood, steel, canvas, and plastic. I draw on my knowledge of human sensation, perception, and cognition - employing methods and imagery that conjure up implicit (under the surface) ideas and themes (e.g., commerce, class, violence, urban decay, identity). Many of the images within my printmaking come from my photography, while others come from public repositories.
Memory is malleable (not conjecture, it’s the nature of the human memory system) - sometimes my work serves in solidifying some aspect of a fleeting state of consciousness into perpetuity. This feels inherent to the visual arts in general, but as my work is somewhat autobiographical, it’s perhaps a bit more evident in my works, than in the works of of a landscape painter for example (not intended as a slight toward landscape painters, I have a deep respect for representational works). That is to say, I view these works as visual abstractions of fleeting states of my conscious awareness. Many of the works in the past year have references to my hometown, Las Vegas, and images and references to my father, who passed away in 2024. He was a sculptor, and our relationship was tenuous at times.
In recent months I've been making mixed media pieces on steel because I tell myself the surface takes my printmaking better than wood or paper - I'm not sure this is actually true. My father worked in ceramics in his early years as an artist, handbuilding, slip casting, sometimes bronze. Eventually he'd turn to making welded steel sculptures out of heavy gauge steel that he would cut with what's known as a Beverly shear. This was the era in his art career I most associate with him - because I was old enough to understand it - and because sometimes I would help him cut the steel; an unwieldily process, feeding sheets of steel into the shear while the other cranked on the handle. It was exhausting work. The recent works on steel are also a nod to him.
