“Many of my paintings involve narrative. Even my more abstract work is, I believe, narrative in character. If there is any one tendency that runs through all experiences in life, whether waking or dreaming, it is the will to narrate. To tell the story is part of the mind’s process. Sometimes the stories we create have a linear quality, at other times they emerge almost as a riddle. But, always, there is story. As has been said of Scheherazade’s mindset in one of my favorite texts, One Thousand and One Nights: “Narrate or die.” That may seem a bit extreme, but I think the situation is often just that.

. . . Through color, collage, the interplay of deep and flattened space, pictorial devices associated with a figurative tradition, and more, I attempt to go into those moments between sense and non-sense, when storytelling is at its most urgent. And while the aim is create work that has that “fated” effect, I always strive to expose the process of narrative, of meaning-making that leads up to it. There is chance, there are mistakes and experimentation, but, in the end, I would love for the result to be that it appears as if “everything is fated,” even as the mystery of what precedes that fated effect remains with the viewer.”