My work explores portraiture and a personal mythology through large scale oil paintings and ink drawings. The complexities in the face of the figures usually  entail multiple fleshy layers of moving appendages and nobular parts that often surround a single eye that exists in the center of the face. The use of rich glossy brushstrokes of bright pink fleshtones are offset and supported by a wide variety of dark neutrals. The paintings also suggest an atmosphere that the creatures exist in. In some of the portraits there exists a frenetic fractured environment that is swirling and breaking apart. In other portraits the atmosphere is dark with much less energetic movement around the figure.

 

In my work I am searching for a god like representation of the human experience. When creating a portrait, I feel the need to suggest all the parts that make up an individual's life. While a representational face can be incredibly effective in emoting the spirit of the individual, I feel the need to translate  it in a different way. I am inspired by the intense gaze that exits in Byzantine icons, as well as the Greek's  and Egyptian's willingness to incorporate animals and monstrous disfigurement into portraiture and storytelling. This kind of interpretation of the figure allows for so many complex metaphors of identity and experience. In my own life I am in awe of the many roles that I play and the many universes I seem to  be balancing all the time and how much darkness and light can exist in unison. I think that within each  of us there is a divine spirit that is always struggling with that balance, sexuality, ego, self acceptance,  gender roles, power, control, sadness, loss, and joy.