About

I work in two series. The first reflects my life in Missouri.
Two figures continually appear in these images, that of myself and that of my dear friend, Lissa. Having first met in California over fifteen years ago, our lives initially intersected only superficially. She was my barista and I would sometimes do her the favor of picking up her daughter from school. They both modeled for me over the following years. After I left California for New York, I saw Lissa and her daughter only once, when they spent the night on their way to travel in West Africa.
We each independently moved to Missouri, she in 2019 and I in 2020. Our friendship has deepened over the past five years. We share a love of vast landscapes and big skies: she yearns for the sands of the Middle East in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert while I am drawn to the stark fields of the Texas panhandle in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. In Missouri, the sky sits close upon the earth, clouds dwarfing the geography so that it lacks angles and any meaningful landmarks. Perhaps this is what led us both, eventually, from the jagged coastline of Northern California to the midwest.
Missouri is as violent as it is beautiful. On summer evenings, clouds from Tiepolo’s heavens sit motionless to the ubiquitous pop-pop of target practice. Kids walk down the street with rifles on their shoulders as they head to public lands maintained by the highly effective department of conservation. Missouri’s chaotic personality continues to inspire and shock me.

The second series is an affectionate parody of rock art. Each painting adapts a classically driven technique to likenesses of contemporary musicians and their song lyrics. These paintings explore the durability of fame and culture by removing pop icons from their proposed zeitgeists and re-contextualizing them in the unexpected rawness of the natural world.