Using the Pop Art tradition as a point of departure, these paintings are appropriated images drawn from a variety of sources: popular ones such as album covers, magazine editorials, coloring books, etc., personal ones drawn from intimate origins like my own childhood sketchbooks, and lastly from more highbrow places like the history of painting. Rather than representing these images with absolute verisimilitude, I paint them in a manner that privileges the touch of the artist’s hand, a touch ranging from the hard and mechanical to the gestural and awkward. The color, usually rendered in matte acrylic, is saturated and unnatural, contradicting its rich painterliness. The resultant paintings are sometimes elegant but at other times downright schmalzy.
What they investigate is the origin and nature of a work of art. Through reproduction and re-presentation they question whether or not an image deserves to be given a second glance, to survive, and most importantly to be painted. Inside this question rests an even deeper one; how a found image finds itself injected into the space of a painting or inversely how a master painting finds itself reproduced in the public’s consciousness as something altogether different than a work of art.