Statement

I consider my most recent paintings as vignettes contemplating my recollections of the trees on the property of my childhood home and how my memory of them is as impermanent as they are. This body of work broadly considers the things in life that are lost to time, and whether the memory of them can ever be a complete and true reconstruction of the past.

Recently, I’ve had a fascination with the influence that technology has on my memory. I view the world so often from a screen that it has become a literal screen between my mind and the real world. “Truth” has become so widely accessible that it is no farther than the ends of our fingertips at any moment. My mind has offloaded information to a source outside of myself. Perhaps, implicitly and unconsciously, we do not feel the need to store truth in our brains any longer. What do we leave ourselves with then? Our own memories to ruminate on and whatever appears next on our screens? In my paintings I ponder how this state of mind can alter memory and ultimately our self-truth.

Each of these paintings are mediations on aspects of my memory of these trees; dappling light, wind in the leaves, rocky roots, reaching limbs, springtime blooms, and other such things. The initial layers are fluid and unrestrained as I recollect the sights and sensations of being with my trees. Imposed over the initial layers is a uniform grid in which I use to “paint out” small squares of the underlying painting, as if the painting is a corrupted file. I work back and forth between these two modes of painting until there is a complexity that can no longer be easily separated. The paintings become a physical representation of the decay of my own memories, exacerbated by my all-consuming relationship with technology.