About
I find myself thinking a lot about the tension between painting from life or from your head. Who's to say a photograph of a street is any more real than a painting of it, or a song? Is our understanding of what's real just common consensus, and if not, where does the reality in something lay? Can I paint something that feels *more* real? I talk about magical realism whenever folks ask me about my paintings because it's a convenient shorthand. This description feels clunky, because painting is always about something real even when picturing something that doesn't or can't exist. It's more accurate to say that my paintings use imagination to heighten and intensify everyday scenes and feelings. They nudge you to think of the world in a more flexible, imaginative way. They make the real fantastical, and the fantastical real.
Practice
The scale of the human body in relation to a painting is important to me. If I'm going for total sensory overload, then a painting should dwarf the viewer in size, like in the case of Green Doorway. If the content of the work is small and intimate, then the painting should be small too: approached by a single person at a time, like looking through a keyhole in the dark to some secret lit interior. On a material, painty level, I try to let the physicality of oil lead the way. Often the images I find are born on the canvas itself- a kind of improvisation that allows for things to float up to the surface and mingle with the world. I'm not satisfied with rote copying or impressionistic rendering- I want to find that perfect synthesis of tactility and illusion that oil lends itself to so well. In a world so inundated with images, how does painting survive? I believe it survives and thrives by leaning into its materiality: its presence as a physical thing relative to the thing of our body. A painting isn't just a picture. It's a thing, made by hands, viewed by eyes and felt in the gut. My practice seeks to align this materiality with whatever I'm interested in painting at the moment.
Currently working on
For the last couple months I've been working on this huge huge painting of the view from the top of that big hill in Humboldt Park, looking down and east at the skyline. Capturing that sense of elevation and depth has been tough! I'm sure I'll end up throwing a UFO or something in there too. Trying to capture that feeling of standing on that hill, the sun setting behind me and the air getting cold and clear, has been a nice productive challenge.
Inspiration
Lots of stuff! I'm a big reader and media watcher and I feel like whatever you consume always ends up feeding back into the work. It's that cool, alchemical process I'm sure lots of artists are familiar with that's kinda hard to pin down in any meaningful analytical way. I try to just let the experience of being alive fuel what I'm up to- a cool idea in a nerdy book, an interesting tree from a walk, or those weird, meta moments standing and looking down your street or spacing out while getting a glass of water at night - the hallway rolling out before you like a carpet, some register in the air shifting that lets you see youself clearly, all at once. Being alive is weird and strange and difficult, and making work about my experiences here on this planet is a nice way to communicate that with other folks who must feel the same way I do: that their experiences are my experiences, that we all have much more in common than not.
Upcoming shows & projects
I've got a couple pieces in group shows around the city that haven't been announced yet! if you're following me on instagram look out for them.
Favorite spot in Chicago
Oof, hard one! Probably sitting on a concrete slab in the summer after having just jumped into the lake, with a beer to drink and a sketchbook to doodle around in.
