I am a 34 year old painter and photographer born and raised in Portland, Oregon by an artistic teacher and a bookseller.  Five years ago, in 2010, photography became a vital outlet for my emotional core when I suffered multiple serious head traumas and was plunged into a darkness I could not have otherwise imagined inhabiting.  A fortuitously acquired camera allowed me to express the pain, loneliness and confusion that I felt during that three year period of recovery in a way nothing else could and I fell so in love with the medium that pressing the shutter became for me a sacred act.  As my brain recovered my vision changed so much that I was less fascinated by exploring photography and, in search of another way to express myself, in the beginning of 2014 I picked up a paint brush.  I was immediately drawn to the idea of using all white paint to express my emotional state of being, and I intuitively paint with dense textural ambiguity in order to honestly convey my state of being in the moment.  I am self-taught in both disciplines and I strive to create an aesthetic which is entirely my own, however I love the work of Rothko, Pierre Soulages, Klimt, Schiele, Pollock, Warhol, Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz and the inimitable Vivian Maier.

The series of white paintings shown here are divided by the tone of white used to create each of them.  Zinc, Titanium and Permalba are separate tones of white paint and I have experimented with numerous brands of each.  As I painted I noticed that the slight differences in tone were magnified when each was used to create a painting, so each series is for me distinct and conveys a unique emotional resonance.  The aim is to convey emotion honestly, intimately and viscerally in a way I have yet to see it conveyed.  Using white alone forces me to use the brush to create something solely using texture and for these series I prefer that to injecting other colors, each of which holds a different conscious or subconscious meaning for every viewer.  For a separate series I have recently experimented using a single color with a white base, and in that context I appreciate the energy of using bold strokes and melding white with the other tone used. Each of these paintings is intended to be a record of my emotional state when they were painted, and I believe them to be as important to me now as the camera was to me when I first began photographing the world around me.

Solo Show:  “Recover”, November-December, 2012.  Graeter Art Gallery, Portland, OR.  Photographs.