"I want to foster a slower and more necessary in-person encounter with painting, so I work in a small format to promote a greater one-to-one relationship between the work and the viewer, and intimate scale of what I make relates to the humble objects the works suggest. Even as the field of painting expands, I find it more urgent to court some of its inherent constraints. Of course, painting still has untapped powers to move an audience, but defining what painting can’t do is as important for me as what it can. For many years, I’ve included some kind of relief element on the surface of my paintings, and the shape that's most frequently included is a loop or spool. A static shape meant to act as a kind of container for a recorded sound or image. The loop which is static, that can not move, spin or playback anything, is meant to underscore its limits.

‍

I routinely work for several years on a small painting, in part because of a restless sense of resolution and notion of success, but also as an act of empathy to honor the labors of the anti-heroic house painter, an unknown agent who might unintentionally produce painterly incidents through acts repeated over a period of years by painting a surface with the goal of covering, protecting, or simply changing the color. The process of painting and repainting an area within a work produces a physical accumulation of layers, creating an index of time and labor. This is especially pronounced at the seams where fields of paint meet and overlap, eventually resulting in a surface that feels as natural as a river-rock. I identify with the sense of everydayness that Chantal Akerman exhibits in her films, and how that relates to the solitary pursuit an artist might endure in striving to create something significant, even heroic, in the day-to-day activity in their studios."