In Peter Pan, Neverland offered children a place to stay young forever. Sadly, one can remain a child forever only by passing away in childhood. At times, children seem to be acutely aware of their own childhood’s mortality. Growing detaches children from the identity and sanctity of who they were. I’m drawn to paint the photographs of children whose disposition express this unique self-awareness, in addition to painting adults who seem haunted or confused by their own loss of identity.

Will a part of my life be on display someday? I wondered about this often as a child, influenced by visits to history museums. That’s why working from old photographs, especially those of my ancestors, feels very appropriate to me. Much of the purpose for having a photo taken a century ago was to aid in remembering. It was even common for a post mortem photo to be taken of the recently deceased if a living portrait hadn’t been taken. The photo served as a lasting reminder for loved ones. For this, I feel like a photo is taken partially as a memento to the fragility of life and becomes the foundation for my artwork.

My ideas usually originate from an intuitive, spiritual thought process in response to a photograph. At times, I feel I’m acting as a spirit’s satellite, with ideas coming through me more than they come from me. Writing poetry is an important part of uncovering and uniting my unconscious with spiritually derived content. Titles of my work are generally a line from a longer poem connected to the painting and often relates to the past, present, or future of my own life.

Because my work derives from photography, incorporating true photographic image in my work was an important philosophic and innovative step to take. Over the past couple years, I’ve invented several methods of photo transfer and printing innovation in order to bring a truer photograph aesthetic into the mediums I work with. While innovating for photographic quality, there is still a desire to create the effect of hand rendered image and supplement this with my own rendering, painting, and drawing skills in order to create a seamless dialogue. For this, I consider my work to be a 21st century hybrid, blending my personal aesthetic with vernacular aesthetics from the late 19th century. These include cabinet photographs, glass plate negatives, burlesque/cabaret/dance theatre, wood engraving, line cuts, photo halftone, etc.

I own a collection of over 1500 early photographic prints from which I choose images to work from. These prints from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s were created from glass negatives. The images were trapped as a negative image within collodion (or gelatin) and silver nitrate solution on a glass plate. I developed painting and drawing techniques to utilize a glassy or plastic surface in order to honor the glass negative.

Often, the photographic quality in my work is a photo halftone. In 1878, Frederic Ives invented the halftone screen. Soon after, this photo-print reproduction technique replaced the woodcut and etchings originally used in popular catalogs, newspapers, etc. The halftone continues to be used in modern newspapers to reproduce black and white photographs using tiny dots.

I’ve done a great deal of research on late 19th century halftone. Magnifying different halftone photos I’d collected from that time period, I counted the number of dots per square inch so that I could set out to achieve similar halftone patterns in my work. The print process I invented to transfer halftone ink to a surface of resin is complex. It is roughly a thirteen-step process, taking place over the course of three days.

Since moving to Seattle in 2006, I have become more involved as a consumer of the local burlesque, cabaret, and dance culture. This has influenced me to explore more kinky and surprising aspects towards one collection of my work, with the incorporation of collage elements, makeup, currency, etc.

I consider my canvas to be a theatre’s stage on which I write and direct a scene in a play by painting it. The theatrical drama of stage and staggering of flat set decoration have always interested me. My treatment of space in paintings reflects this stage-inspired perception. The way in which eyes appear to follow a viewer in my resin paintings, the spatial depth of resin boxes, or the life-size qualities of my oil paintings and mixed media work help foster a live theatrical relationship for the audience.