Booth 804
(See map below)
About the Artist
I grew up in the house of Aaron Burr’s many mistresses, an old brownstone that told of the past. It was possessed of a temperamental boiler that constantly broke down forcing the family on many mornings to wake under layers of blankets and coats and to heat our bath water on the stove. It created in me a sense of existing in multiple times and realities at the same moment. When I was eight or so, the streets surrounding my house were closed off and covered with crisp white paper, and smeared with bloody animal parts. It was a hallucinatory sight, an indelible image of the quirks of New York City. It was like a dream, too strange to be real. Experiences like these in my youth helped shape my art in later life. In my “reality”, time and place coalesce, coexist, and contradict. Inside is outside, outside is inside, vines grow up dining room walls, subjects become porous. There are pictures within pictures, rooms inside of rooms, explorations of the connections and distortions between our inner rooms, and the vast clarity of the natural world beyond.
Just as Freud said the house represents the mind, my interiors illustrate cognizance; the conflict between each thought and/or emotion, and its counterbalance. Objects are imbued with meaning and identity. They interact, they make commentary, they reach for, they ogle, they spy. Just as electrons move between physical objects, energy moves, so “inert” things act and react to their surroundings, giving and receiving electrons. My process starts with collage. I look for juxtapositions of images that speak to me emotionally and politically, searching for new ways of seeing familiar things. I do several pencil sketches based on those collages. On canvas, I sketch out the composition of the painting using acrylic paint, adding random ideas from whatever is going on in the universe at that moment. I use objects and pictures, and words to convey those ideas. Then I move into oil paint, I use large atmospheric strokes, sometimes layering with a palette knife, and or glazing. I add details and refine the idea as I go along, sometimes scratching stray phrases into the wet paint. I let a painting rest for a few weeks and then go back with a critical eye and adjust shading, add more details, and sometimes rearrange the entire painting until it finally gets released from my clutches. Lives and works in Silver Spring, MD.
