“Contemporary painting is an attempt to reconcile the competing and yet inseparable aspects of representation and abstraction.” – David Van Everen
I wrote those words years ago, and they still ring true, with one change: I’m no longer trying to reconcile representation and abstraction. Sustaining the tension between the recognizable world and painting’s formal language is one of the primary ways I try to externalize an inner condition, and that tension has become the catalyst for everything I make.
Formal tension and psychological tension are inseparable in my work. The first decision is often where the figure sits in the rectangle. After that, the painting becomes a constraints-based optimization problem, and the constraints are pairs of opposites: warm and cool, textured and smooth, spatial and flat, vivid and muted, naturalistic and abstract, gestural and static. These dichotomies are the periodic table of my work. Every painting and drawing is built from the tension between them, and the emotional response a viewer feels comes from how those tensions are held.
The figure is my muse. A face or body is a recognizable human presence, and it’s also a set of formal elements: lines, masses, planes, gestures. I’m drawn to the moment when a curved shoulder becomes a flat plane, a negative space takes on a life of its own, or a subject emerges from loose brushstrokes.
My recent portrait series, inspired by Jenny Saville, has been the most direct test of this. These paintings begin with being receptive to the model’s inner state: a fleeting thought, a melancholy moment, a revelation. Likeness grounds the work, while color, form, and composition evoke the emotion that connects the viewer with the subject.
Her Warmth is the most abstract of them. A slab of hot red-orange runs across the bowed face, and loose blue-violet lines sweep across the figure instead of following it, so drawing and color seem to tell two different stories at once. In The Moment, a man gazes upward, his face built from blocky planes of deep blue and violet against warm ochre, with the darkest ultramarine pooled beneath his lifted jaw. The contrast and the upward gaze suggest something happening to him right now: a revelation, a mystical encounter, perhaps even the realization that his life is coming to an end. Which moment it is, I leave to the viewer. In Lonely Woman, a woman rests her head against her hand, her face caught in a light like a spotlight that isolates her against the cool green ground. Beneath her is an ambiguous, flesh-colored form. It may be a lover’s body, which would mean she is lonely even there.
Alongside the portraits, I make what I call interior dramas: paintings and drawings built from a personal visual language of characters, archetypes, and motifs I’ve returned to for years to tell stories about my inner life. Their meanings aren’t fixed in advance. They build up through repetition and juxtaposition. In earlier works like The Vindictive Muse, The Process Is the Point, and A Muse’s Disdain, the formal concerns sit closer to the surface. Overlapping planes set up spatial ambiguity, and a carefully modeled figure might share the canvas with flat shapes, gestural marks, or a passage in an entirely different style or medium. That willingness to let competing pictorial languages coexist goes back to my years at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) in the mid-’90s, where I studied with Raymond Saunders and took in the postmodern idea that a painting doesn’t have to speak in a single voice.
My earliest influence was Picasso. As a kid, I collected stamps, and I had a commemorative Guernica stamp that I studied over and over. Rembrandt and Van Gogh came next, then the Abstract Expressionists and the Bay Area Figurative painters, Diebenkorn above all. David Salle and Eric Fischl showed me how images could collide and still tell a story, and Cecily Brown remains a huge inspiration for my abstract figurative work. I also look closely at children’s drawings. Their marks are genuine and direct in a way I’m always trying to get back to.
I work in traditional media because they still give me formal puzzles that will never be fully solved. A finite surface, a particular material, and the marks already on it keep producing new problems. Working through them, usually in a flow state where many problems are in play at once, makes me a better thinker. I don’t decide what a painting means and then make it. I find out what it is by making it.
What I’m after in each work is the point where none of it settles, yet everything holds: the dichotomies in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, where the structure of a painting and its psychological content can no longer be pulled apart. That’s when an image can give form to an inner life, something a viewer might recognize without my ever fully explaining it.