In the broadest terms, I, as a painter, am interested in the reciprocal relationship that exists between vision and memory.  Experience becomes memory, and memory turns back to inform experience. This transformative exchange defines intimate and critical truths about how we see the world. My paintings explore the idea that vision is broken. The essential rupture that happens between the seen and the remembered is what makes vision complete. 
    
    My current painting process begins with a collage. I photograph my subject over a period of time, with an eye for the unusual. Working over a period of months, I capture the subject as it grows, decays, gets torn down and built anew. Color and light excites me. Time causes decay or stasis with perplexing discontinuity. The collages I make from my photographs explore the idea that experience is complicated by memory. The collage becomes a metaphor as well as a point of departure. Through their making, I conduct a visual exploration which allows me to fragment and reconstitute the painting. The collage, an accumulation of broken, piled, and torn images, becomes a symbol for the imperfect joinery of memory. The steps of collaging and painting are not mutually exclusive. I often paint from several collages at once, or from memory. I sometimes return to collaging to explore a new reworking within the painting process. The process itself becomes a moving metaphor. The exchange between fragmentation and restoration carries the self through to actualization, like an ocean wave carries a boat . 
    
If the mind is like a shore, than the visible world is like a wave, crashing down upon the mind. It sometimes feels like the water has overwhelmed the land, but the wave only performs a reconfiguration. In this way, water and land work together to form a transitional stability, a permanence in flux.