I explore the relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer. I have always been fascinated by the stories in a face or a body and the way they seem to become both crystallized and amplified through painting. In figurative painting we permit ourselves the indulgence of rendering imperative and absolute the significance of the human being.

On "The Underground Series":

Sometime around the autumn of 2010 I began stealing portraits of people in the New York subway for use in my current body of work titled the “Underground” series. In the context of a train car, what we see in each image is one component of a journeying collective of permeable solitudes.

Each of these paintings began with a snapshot taken covertly. The images are manipulated digitally and then transferred to the painting surface by way of a drawing. I use the manipulated photograph as a visual reference for color, contrast, and proportion, and the filename is appropriated into the painting's title.

The process of discreetly photographing candid subjects and then painting their portraits inverts their solitude and creates an interaction, even an intimacy. It is my goal in these paintings to bridge an essential emotional and narrative gap between subject and viewer.