I create photographically mimetic paintings. I have coined the term “photocentric” to describe my carefully crafted airbrushed paintings. I capture images using photography in museums and then translate the images into finely crafted airbrush paintings. Often viewers initially assume my paintings are digitally printed photographs. My intension is that after a closer reading, they discover that they are in fact 100% “hand crafted” paintings. Following this realization, I believe that a profound shift occurs in their interpretation, appreciation, and relationship to the work. My hope is that my paintings are seen not just as a “picture,” or an exercise in craft, but as an intriguing, contemplative, constructed recontextualized image and object.

 

The primary focus of my art practice for almost 50 years has been reinterpreting artworks including sculptures, cultural artifacts and even photographs as seen through their and their institutional display. The subject matter of many of my recent paintings are contemporary sculptures. They are part of a larger series titled “Museum Studies.” This body of works addresses how contemporary culture sees, consumes, appreciates, and interprets my views of artworks and artifacts that are altered and affected through layered visual or cultural systems of seeing, their institutional display and ultimately through my translation into paintings.  

 

In my paintings, much of my work addresses how we “see.”.. I try to be faithful to the fidelity of the photograph and exploit photographic tropes that differ from our retinal vision.  My goal is that through my photographic capture, and then through the metamorphosis that takes place through my painting process, I create an “alchemic” type image and experience. I am fascinated by the transformation created through the views that I curate and ultimately paint. I seek to present an intriguing concept, subject and process that questions issues surrounding craft, illusion, originality, and our cultural value systems.

 

In my most recent series, “Recycled Collages,” I am exploring my past, readdressing images employed or archived visual material and strategies that were used in previous works.  The source for these paintings begin as digitally created collages that are then translated into paintings.