1. A World of Making
A World of Making
My world has always been a world of making.
Long before I thought of myself as an artist, I was building forts from branches, inventing games from cardboard and electronics, drawing for hours on the living room floor, balancing objects on impossible points, and taking apart toys simply to understand how they worked. I rarely experienced ideas as passing thoughts. They arrived as vivid possibilities that seemed almost tangible, and they remained with me until I could give them form. Whether I drew them, built them, rearranged them, or wrote them down, making became the way I completed my thinking.
Looking back, I don't believe creativity was simply something I enjoyed. It became the way I explored the world.
Over time, I realized that I wasn't interested in objects as much as I was interested in the relationships that existed between them. I became fascinated by the way light describes form, how weight shifts through a composition, how materials respond to one another, how the space between two things can alter the way they are experienced, and how the smallest changes in arrangement can transform an entire image. Whether I was studying drawing, painting, graphic design, or simply observing the natural world, I found myself returning to the same questions. I wanted to understand not only what something was, but how it behaved.
That curiosity continues to guide my work today.
My paintings are often described as fragmented portraits or modular compositions assembled from reclaimed wooden blocks. While that is true formally, the fragmentation is not an end in itself. It is one way of investigating perception. By separating an image into individual parts, I become more aware of the relationships that allow the whole to exist. Light, material, interval, balance, and proximity all become active participants in the experience of looking.
The work asks me to slow down before it asks anything of the viewer.
This distinction has become increasingly important to me. I do not experience sustained attention as something that happens automatically. Much of everyday life moves quickly and carries an enormous amount of visual and mental noise. Throughout my life I have found myself intentionally creating environments that allow my attention to settle—walking through forests, listening to jazz, tending a garden, spending quiet hours in the studio, or observing a single object until its complexity begins to reveal itself. These practices are not escapes from the world. They are ways of returning to it more fully.
Painting has become one of those practices.
It allows me to remain with an object long enough for it to move beyond recognition and become an experience. The longer I observe, the more I become aware that every surface contains subtle shifts of light, every material carries its own character, and every relationship within a composition contributes to a larger sense of balance. Making, for me, is less about expressing an idea than it is about discovering what careful attention makes visible.
When viewers encounter my work, I hope they experience something similar. I am not asking them to arrive at a particular interpretation or narrative. I am inviting them to inhabit a different rhythm of perception, one in which ordinary things can become unfamiliar again through sustained observation.
Looking back across my life, I see that the questions have remained remarkably consistent even as the work has changed. The materials have changed. The subjects have changed. My understanding has changed. But the underlying impulse has remained the same.
I continue to make because making is how I investigate the world.
Each painting is less an answer than another opportunity to understand how light, material, balance, and attention quietly shape the way we experience what has been in front of us all along.