Black Box

I am interested in architectural construction because I see it as a metaphor for the activity of painting. My pictures are "constructed" one step—one formal or material decision—at a time. From a distance, many of my paintings appear to be photo-realistic, but that illusion breaks down as the viewer moves closer. I work with both oil and acrylic paints, along with a variety of painting mediums that enable me to alter the viscosity, sheen and surface texture of the paint. I also explore a variety of incongruent stylistic strategies within a single image. In this way, the "space" in the paintings, while alluding to three-dimensional illusionistic space, is more closely aligned with the pictorial "space" of Modernism, always referring the viewer back to the flatness of the picture plane. The influence of 20th-century abstract painting is ever-present in this work. The generic forms of suburban and urban architecture provide a convenient framework through which I can explore many of th