David B. Smith Gallery

Artist Statement:

As a child I was exposed mainly to French and American impressionists and one instance from early on that is burnt into my memory is standing in a room surrounded by extremely large Monet water lily paintings. Being a small kid, the size, depth and simple beauty was even more dramatic and stimulating. On that trip my father bought me my first watercolor kit at the museum store. Jump to freshman year of college when I was assigned a writing project about anything in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wandering the museum, I found a room featuring Cy Twombly's Fifty Days at Iliam, a painting in ten parts based on Homer's the Iliad. This blew my mind in a similar way to the Monets over a decade earlier, except these works told a story in text as well as being beautiful. The blurred memory of Monet mixed with Twombly has been a constant influence on my paintings ever since.

I try my best to merge the emotional impetus of each work with a touch a gestural painterly expressionism. The works are layer upon layer of text, scrawled graffiti, streaming acrylic and watercolor and heavy palette knife applied oils. Like layers of sound bites collaged one on top of the other, spray-painted words are blackened out by rapid brush strokes, every line and every stroke, every blacked out phrase, has a purpose. The themes beneath the works vary depending on what was in my mind that day or month, whether it is the death of Hunter Thompson, the unenforceable language of the Geneva Convention, or something as simple as a past relationship, whatever brought on emotion, I've attempted to replicate on canvas.