HOME, or Interiority

                Home is an ongoing series of paintings and drawings based in imagery of my house, family and immediate environment. In the work, I am interested in exploring the spiritual, emotional and psychological aspects of domestic life. The household is fertile territory for rhopography (things that are overlooked by history as unimportant, often having to do with ordinary everyday life and objects, unchanging creaturely needs, habits and desires) and philosophical and religious questioning. By mining personal experiences for their emotional impact I attempt a kind of observational expressionism or emotional realism.

                My paintings and drawings are mostly small in scale and painted with attention to detail, reflecting both my interest in the humble, interior, and intimate, and also placing the paintings within a tradition of representational painters concerned with imbuing their canvases with emotion, including: Gwen John, Wilhelm Hammershoi, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Johannes Vermeer, Pierre Bonnard and Christiane Pflug.

                Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his monograph on Howard Hodgkin, declares that “small represents a certain lack of self-importance… it represents a desire for compression and urgency and immediacy… Small paintings are generally more intimate than large paintings, partly for the simple practical reason that it is difficult for more than one person at a time to look at a small painting…” Small paintings are well suited to rhopographic and domestic themes, where smallness can represent the humility of daily life. Small paintings are portable, built to a scale which is domestic and daily, well-suited to tiny kitchens, bedrooms, and the small rooms of old suburban houses and apartments. Small paintings become like windows, they “open up an entire world,” as Gaston Bachelard noted about miniatures in The Poetics of Space.

                Paintings can function as windows not only in their relationship to scale, but also psychologically, opening up a view into the artist’s inner life, preoccupations and concerns. Because representational paintings are objects, they create an aura of desire around them. As much as the viewer or painter wishes to enter into the world of the painting, they are physically denied that possibility and can only access the painting by building an interior or imaginative relationship to the piece. The world inside my paintings is one of illumination and observation, a dialogue built between my private life and contemporary and historical ideas about painting, domesticity, poetry, and emotion.

                By looking closely at paintings, much can be discovered: a sense of spiritual essence, inner life, and the quality and texture and color of things. Prolonged observation of the elements of my life, home, family, self, pets, objects, neighborhood and garden has taught me that there is significance and intensity in vision. I dream of this vision becoming more radiant and acute, never sentimental but always essential. When I look and pay attention I feel more alert to the qualities and possibilities of living. Through painting I can share this contemplative and ecstatic experience of looking with other people, as well as making meaning of my own life.