Joy is super important for me in the studio.  More complicated than its cousin happiness, joy includes satisfaction, resolve, and comic relief from one’s darkness. There is an absurdity to the act of painting— almost an act of magic that often cracks me up while I work. It feels like there are fewer rules with these new paintings; except for being true and trying to keep them fresh and effortless.

In the fall of 2019, I returned to oil paint after a long time and started a new series of paintings: a few of my favorite things. The series is about the sharing of gifts. The objects in the paintings are not only from intimate exchanges, but also often mark a time of deep longing. Although some of these belongings are ephemeral or seemingly insignificant—some of them more monumental than others—all rise to the occasion. 

Years ago, I discovered the short story “Solid Objects” by Virginia Woolf about a man whose life is transformed by the discovery of a lump of glass he finds while walking on the beach. He completely rearranges his life around the admiration of this “pretty stone” and gives up a successful life of politics. This quote from “Solid Objects” has stayed with me for many years: “Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.”

The objects that I paint are more than what they are. Their origins transport me to faraway times and places and the paintings become embodied time machines. By what things are placed next to each other, how color is intensified, and how the touch of paint sits on the canvas, the mundane becomes divine.