My current paintings exist somewhere between a Jungian mass media collective subconscious and a lived memory.  The figures in my work emerge like half materialized apparitions from a digitized dream.  Nothing is solid, nothing has discrete forms, the movement defies recording, yet everything feels like a visual reality.  Un-named but familiar archetypes emerge from reservoirs of mythology and transmigrate into fading cinematic recollections.  In this work, my first foray into figurative painting, I pull from every historical and contemporary aesthetic convention to create imagistically original paintings that exist simultaneously as abstract compositions, representational nudes, and psychological explorations of mood.  Time lapsed movement implies ambiguous narratives in which figures seem to haunt and seduce the viewer, often engaging in indecipherable rituals that ride the line between indulgence and ascetic mortification. 

Taking my cue from the work of Gericault, Rembrandt, Boucher, Rubens, David and Wtewael, I use the figure as a motif, which, when repeated with variations, like a theme in a Bach concerto, create a complex, abstract contrapuntal composition that conveys mood simply with gesture, color, light, and movement, without discursive narrative signifiers.  They also incorporate aesthetics pulled from modern mass media images of the body from fashion magazines and movies to the internet.  The subject matter of my paintings obviously comes out digital photography and movie making.  This reflects our contemporary culture’s experience of the world which is mediated, filtered, and largely formed by technological forms of image making like digital photography, TV and cinema, video games, music videos and computer generated imagery.  Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memory describes the role that mass media plays in the formation of our memories.  She claims that the countless stories with which we are bombarded via mass media, expands our memory to include stories to which “we have no natural connection.”  I may be a white American man, but if I read the Bluest Eye, or watch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, my memory has been expanded to include the experience of repressed African Americans or Classical Chinese culture in a format that feels real even if it is only a fictionalized representation.  And so, each of us walks around with a bundle of images and memories we have experienced vicariously through mass media.  In my opinion, this dynamic of prosthetic memory extends beyond the stories, extending even into the aesthetic sensibilities used to portray those memories.  To me, the Great Depression exists in black and white, the 1970’s in grainy, faded orange tones.  17^th century Holland is a dark room with bright spotlights, while 18^th century France is strewn with trees resembling pastel fractals run amuck across the horizon.  Depending on the media to which we are exposed, we may have imagery in our mind’s eye that includes everything from Ruben’s Judgment of Paris to a 50cent music video, and here I would argue the only significant differences are the technological and aesthetic ones. 

Since the psychology behind the great works of art remain the same (be they in history paintings or Hollywood melodrama), I have chosen to weave the aforementioned chronologically, spatially, and technologically distinct aesthetic sensibilities into one process that reflects the duplicitous nature of our borrowed memories which feel so real, and the way borrowed memory and lived experience begin to melt into one another until authenticity is forgotten.  That process uses both tradition and technology to create paintings that feel as timeless as Rembrandt and as current as CGI.  I begin with live models who I light and photograph.  I instruct the models to move while I take the photos, repeating the same simple gestures over and over with slight variations in a process that verges on the automatic.  I banish all narrative inclinations at this time, preferring to discover something unlooked for in the product.  This automatic photographic engagement with the model furthers my investigation of photography as an inventive rather than a documentary medium, allowing the mistakes of photography to “draw” unimaginable tableau’s.  The results range from straight forward figure studies to Muybridge like motion studies, and also monstrous figural conflations and inventions.  I take these as thumbnail sketches and begin assembling them into new compositions.  Here photography and painting begin a process of bilateral exchange.  As I begin painting, I reinvent the figures, taking and recombining parts of several photos into each.  Frequently, I will then photograph the painting, take it into photoshop and further manipulate, add or subtract from it there.  I will then alter the painting based on the new jpeg and repeat the process over until I am satisfied.  This process owes something to the photorealists, as well as Richter and Tuymans, but it furthers the degree of interplay between photography and painting, seeing photography not as a buffer to provide ironic distance for painting, nor as a structural aesthetic duality.  My work uses photography and painting in a way that makes both processes equally inventive and documentary.  The resulting paintings look like Vermeers made with a movie projector instead of a camera obscura. 

The process, as it has evolved, grants me a series of artistic gifts.  The automatic photographic process gives me source material akin to the uncreated ether…there are infinite unfulfilled potentialities within it.  I can reach in into that source and pull out whatever I respond to, thus enabling the mood and whatever limited narrative there might be to emerge as products of the process rather than the drivers.  This gives the paintings, which are labor intensive endeavors, an immediacy and spontaneity not necessarily inherent in the academic painting tradition.  It also allows me to “find” psychologically powerful imagery rather than construct it.  This is important because with photography and TV we respond much more to the “found” facial expression than the constructed one’s in Baroque art.  Furthermore, the process also allows me to invent and improvise passages that have no direct photographic source, something not possible in digital photographic media.  Then, through the physical properties of paint, I can create rich, layered surfaces that heighten spatial, atmospheric, and color effects.   Oil paint has been linked to the depiction of human flesh for centuries, and that physicality rescues the image from the alienating coldness of the photograph.

This process, which combines tradition and technology, produces emotive paintings that allude to academic history painting, boudoir painting, cinematic spectacle, CGI, digital print and internet media.  They have tinges of Futurism and Symbolism, a Baroque compositional aesthetic and a photographic sense of space and form.  They are the mass mediated images of our collective secondhand experience as it forms its own internal logic within our psyche.