Ambiguity is central to my creative process. It draws you in - inviting you to examine the technique, to question, to engage, to respond, to complete the work and ultimately to experience your own subjective reality.

 

Each portrait begins with a single face with an ambiguous expression, shared gaze, uncertain context and a few naturalistic cues. This is all calculated to encourage you to complete the painting based on your own mental image and then to create the narrative from your own experience and state of mind.

 

This is your subjective reality.​ You will do a better job completing my painting with your own perfect mental image and personal narrative than I can.​​

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​​​Cezanne and the seminal Cubists believed that time, the fourth dimension, could be incorporated in their work so as to cause the viewer to process and perceive their work as more real. They said they painted successive appearances in to a single image reconstituted in time.

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I often paint multiple viewpoints, slight misalignments, inconsistent lighting, out of focus elements and subtly different expressions with the same face. I combine flat and dimensional elements. I use a limited pallet along with metallic and iridescent colors that produce changing patterns with changes in lighting and angle of view. ​​

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​If I engage you with the eyes, I can work more freely elsewhere - suggesting some features, rendering others in detail. I can color outside the lines and trust your mind to resolve it. You assemble vague outlines, scribbles and graphic vectors into a recognizable face.​

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I paint both with acrylic paint on canvas and digitally with my iPad. My digital-hybrid paintings combine traditional painting, digital drawing and photographic manipulation. ​

 

Each digital-hybrid begins with a repurposed high-resolution image of one of my large-scale, unfinished acrylic-on-canvas works. I transfer the image to my iPad, where I continue to draw and build layers of marks and graphic elements. Using photographic tools, I dodge, burn, saturate, and resize the image, creating a new, original work entirely by my hand. These pieces are displayed on monitors, projected at theater scale, or printed on a variety of media including dye sublimation on aluminum.​

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Accidents and experiments are central to my process. A drip may be random; what I do with it is not. I work freely, observing and exploiting unexpected effects, turning problems into possibilities. Each painting becomes a series of fresh starts - a surface repeatedly disrupted and rebuilt. My expectation of the image evolves as the painting evolves.​​

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Here are a few articles which further describe my methods.