I’m naturally drawn to observing and collecting ephemera. These are the transient objects, textures, and printed matter we encounter in our daily lives that we disregard or simply overlook. I find that anything, from the template of a child’s cursive worksheet to the motif pattern on a paper plate, can be appreciated for its formal qualities. I find joy in sorting through scraps to find moments that speak to me as art. The principles that make an image pleasing are at work everywhere: composition, movement, contrast, scale, connection.
I collect, document, and collage these remnants into the primary source material of my paintings. These compositions are then scanned and edited into digital form. The images are reused and recombined in shifting scales and color palettes to produce a series of variations, and iterations, each unique despite formal and aesthetic echoes. My resulting paintings aim to monumentalize and celebrate the iconography of our everyday life so they can be remembered and seen anew.
This process is a cross between photography and a Jacquard loom. It also echoes printmaking techniques and textile traditions like needlepoint and weaving. The interplay between different modes of production and the physical-digital-physical feedback loops creates hybrid paintings that connect traditional methods of art to emerging technology.
My paintings bridge the hand and the machine. They are constructed with a painting machine I developed, a kind of CNC device that holds a brush and moves across a 3ft x 4ft workspace, laying down paint one stroke at a time. I write the software that drives it, and the paintings are built, layer by layer, over thousands of lines of code into an evolving, intricate, textural surface. The machine doesn’t do this work alone. I monitor and guide it through the process, taking stock of errors and mishaps to embrace as part of the final piece. While the process is based on the language of computer 1s & 0s, the final result reflects the magical, textural qualities of paint.