[statement]

My paintings investigate the irony of the American lifestyle, and evolve from my experience of living in the suburban Midwest.  With a focus on color and pattern, my representational paintings draw attention to banal landscapes, structures, objects, and situations that are often so familiar they become invisible.  Making the invisible visible by finding beauty, strangeness, unfamiliarity, or irony in the ordinary and familiar is the motivation for my work.

Many of my paintings are small and often contradict the size of their subject.  Their scale fosters an intimate relationship with both maker and viewer.  They usually exist in series as well, as I am drawn to patterns created by repetition. 

I work with oil paints and found materials, regularly incorporating text from vintage books to explore the relationship of text to image and create stimulating juxtapositions.  The imagery in my work is derived from my photographs, and my representational painting style manifests many photographic qualities.  I am particularly influenced by the work of photographers Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore.

In the artmaking process, I aim to provoke certain questions: How does one define “ordinary”?  How can the familiar be made unfamiliar?  What defines landscape?  Does landscape dictate social structure or does social structure dictate landscape?  With subtle humor and criticality, my work explores the relationships of text to image; landscape to lifestyle; land to structure; past to present; familiar to unfamiliar; and innocence to corruption.