Places are as fleeting as memory: they can only last for as long as you are willing to be there, and then they are gone. And a memory, though it can technically persist like a place, will never be the same each time it is remembered. No moment is truly identical to another, and no place is ever the same as the first time you visit it. I paint the places I have been or hope to be, or those I have only passed through briefly, and how I wish them to be.

I have always been a bit of a homebody, but not for lack of yearning. The world just moves slower in a place that you end up returning to day in and day out, and the images of familiar spaces come into focus more easily. When I have the time to sit and study, the place itself or more often, the memories, I get to pick apart the “thing” in the hopes to experience every aspect of it, commit it to a more perfect memory. Each granular piece, the range of colors that come together and average out to the surface of “blue” or “yellow” or “purple”, the small textures and details that first caught my interest, become apparent.

My paintings come together as puzzles, and I very seldom work on one particular object or aspect at a time. Instead, green comes to life, and then orange or pink, and when returning and revisiting and revising, they start to come together into a thing resembling a “whole” work, even with the spaces in between. In this way memories come together, of different days, years, seasons, and become smaller smudges on the larger canvas that is, was, or could be a place. And, in the same way, moments and aspects of my life come together as paintings, as a puzzle of a body of work, and as a memory of an image of a painter.