Working with common themes such as transition, aging, isolation, and loss, I am interested in the fragility of relationships and people’s awkwardness in trying to coexist and relate to one another. To that end I create miniature 3D models to serve as evolving still lifes from which I paint detailed narrative paintings. Using cardboard, foam, wood, paint, glue, and model railroad miniatures, I construct various fictional, scale models. Recent models have included a neighborhood, lake, theater, doctor’s office, church, and numerous domestic interiors. The models become a stage on which I develop narratives. They offer me complete control over lighting, composition, and vantage point to achieve a certain dramatic effect.

While working with tiny pieces that often slip frustratingly from my fingers, I am reminded of the delicacy and vulnerability of the world I am creating, and this summons empathy for my subject. The clumsy inadequacies of miniatures help me to convey a sense of artifice and distance.  I try to paint the scenes in a way that feels like a believable world, but an alternate, fabricated world.

The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments meant to elicit specific feelings and to provoke the viewer to consider the moment before or after the one presented in the painting. I am interested in storytelling over time through repeated depictions of the same house or car or person, seasonal changes, and shifting vantage points. Like the disturbing difficulty of trying to put rolls of film in order several years after the pictures have been taken, my aim is for the collective images to suggest a known past that is just beyond reach.

Throughout 2010 and 2011, I created a mosaic with fabricator Franz Meyer of Munich for MTA’s Arts for Transit. Installation of the project, “Heydays” was recently completed in the 86th St./4th Ave. R Line Subway Station in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This past summer my work was also featured in “Otherworldly”, a show at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Recent awards include The American Academy of Arts & Letters The Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, a NYFA Fellowship in Painting, and a residency at The Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program. Sore Spots, a show of new paintings, monotypes, and sculpture, is currently on view at Galleri Magnus Karlsson in Stockholm.