“I grew up in a very crowded New York City apartment. My artwork was really the only thing that was mine alone and for that reason it became very important. Central Park was a block away which meant the Metropolitan Museum was in my backyard. I spent a lot of time there, wandering in the great halls. The presence of so many beautiful essential things nurtured me. I went to an arts high school. After school and on Saturdays my friends and I took even more classes at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union and Greenwich Street Pottery. Being an artist was closely connected to my social life and my academics. From an early age, it felt inevitable that I would become an artist.

Painting helps organize my thinking, my energy and my perceptions in a way that nothing else does. Seeing art has always made me want to make it. Creating art is a way of making sense of things, of saying something meaningful without words. Sometimes I seem to be calling attention to something at the edge of consciousness or dredging up something long buried. This can happen by making pictures or without using recognizable imagery. Sometimes it feels like magic is involved when uniting the physical presence of paint with the realm of the spirit -- magic born of some combination of anxiety and doggedness, open heartedness and luck.

There is a lot of back and forth in the studio when I start to work. Every emotion has its say over the course of starting and finishing a piece. If I start with anticipation and enthusiasm, there’ll probably be a time when it feels more like drudgery. If I start a bit lost or hopeless there will be a good chance I’ll feel ridiculously pleased at some point in the process. I have come to understand and accept the nature of this ebb and flow. It speaks to how many sides of myself need to assert themselves in the final piece. I never know until I am done just what “done” will look like. I don’t plan too much anymore.

My most recent paintings embody a sort of call and response rhythm that evolves between making a mark and then listening for the next move. I am interested in the possibility that paint might record fluctuations of consciousness in an animated and open-ended way. I am also drawn to the ways in which color surprises and delights. To that end, I impose no pre-conceived order on the paintings, which can feel like painting without a safety net.”