Paintings
My paintings are based entirely on my personal relationship with the rust-belt city of Superior, Wisconsin where I lived off and on throughout my twenties. For reasons I’m still sorting-out, I had come to identify with the town and had in fact come to see certain structures as embodiments, as personifications and models of my own thoughts at the time; to look at these structures was to look at myself. And so I walked, every day over every inch of that city believing I could solve the problems at hand. I work toward this resolution today, and while my interests have broadened and the scope of my concepts grown ever more encompassing, it is because of this personal association that I work at all.
Conceptually, my paintings are the archetypal images of post-productive America, of the American interior, of American voracity and anxiety. This is the American temperament realized in its starkest terms as spelled-out across the industrial Great Lakes. They are portraits of the American character. But at bottom, they are self-portraits.
Materials
My particular brand of mixed process painting came from my interest in naturally occurring textures, stains and scoring as found in weathering, decay and general disintegration of mostly man-made objects. Because I utilize a growing number of materials in conjunction with one another -- this experimentation takes place on the work itself -- an order-of-operations, or hierarchy of materials has come about which yields certain results; the below paintings are representative of this.
Building and Unbuilding the Globe 2009 oil, ignited gunpowder and ash on 9 canvas 4' x 20'
Globe 2009 oil, ignited gunpowder, ash and sawdust on canvas 5' 8" x 6' 3"
Freighthouse 2006 oil, ash, toilet paper on canvas 22" x 28"
Fishing Tug 2006 oil, ash, toilet paper on canvas 22" x 28" (sold)
