calculating density and recess on the boys' side

It seems to me that in American culture boys often consume alcohol to become more like men and men consume to become more like boys. My work springs from the investigation of how boys and men interact with each other, often with alcohol as a mediator. However, my work is not entirely image driven; the content is revealed through a worked painted surface.

The smell of oil paint excites me when I walk into my studio. Paint functions as a tangible physical presence on a two dimensional surface. I love that I can obliterate all of the history of an image with a few bold strokes or I can choose to allow traces of my visual thinking to appear in the final image. The viewer inherently realizes that a painting is a constructed image; this opens the narrative possibilities of painting. A painting has none of the questions regarding fiction versus documentation that may be associated with photography.

Too often, people (myself included) try to simplify things. They want to chop branches down to limbs and limbs down to a trunk. In this quest for reduction, things get oversimplified and lost. I seek to complicate. I am a bundle of contradictions: open minded and judgmental, self effacing and arrogant, thoughtful and careless - I want my work to sit within these contradictions.

My interests have been the same for many years: painting, communication, story telling, masculinity, alcohol culture, tragedy, comedy, fragility mending, loss and transformation. I want to make paintings that equally show my love of Philip Guston, Spalding Gray, and Calvin and Hobbes. The work simultaneously references the Dutch still life paintings I studied as an undergraduate and my vibrant memories of the enormous piles of empty, and often broken, bottles in my dorm room.