My work is informed by an interest in the relationship between the physical life of the body and systems of morality. I am intrigued by the conflicts that arise between impulses, urges, and viscerally motivated behavior of people and the moral constructs that we have in place to measure and judge these actions and impulses. As individuals and societal groups, we strive to be good, or to become better according to a moral framework; and often we find that our humanness, that deep irrational pull of the body, thwarts our movements toward dignity. As time passes and the world changes, we try to shed the influence of moral standards which appear to be flawed or perhaps even irrelevant in a contemporary life, but find it difficult to wash their films away from our skins. Other tensions in human life that inform my work are those that lie between the emotional and the intellectual, and between the hidden internal world of feelings and the personas we project to others.

The process of painting, for me, is a profound metaphor for the content mentioned above. Paint is undeniably bodily; it is physical, tactile, unruly, mobile. I am drawn to its visceral qualities, its potential for disorder and danger. I wish to honor these qualities and to allow them to flourish. At the same time, and perhaps in direct opposition, I seek control, order, a visual equivalent of moral dignity, as I build each painting. I move between a process of caring for and brutalizing the paint as each image finds its way into existence. Active, physical surfaces confront ordered compositional structures, creating a visual tension which echoes the tensions that underpin the human condition: the visceral against the moral, the emotional against the intellectual, the internal against the external.

Over time, text has become an increasingly important component in my paintings. All of the text in my images is painted directly by hand, most often without the aid of templates and in thickly applied paint that raises out from the painting's surface. My physical process is extremely labor intensive and time consuming, but the presence of a human hand repetitively and carefully crafting each form embeds certain content into the images that could not exist otherwise. The words and phrases I select for my paintings are carefully chosen not only for what they mean and how they sound, but also for their visual impact. While I invent some of the incorporated text, I also use text from sources that include the Bible, works by Antonin Artaud, Octave Mirbeau, Alfred de Musset, and the psychiatric writings and case studies of Wilhelm Stekel.

For the last few years, I have been at work on a series of paintings based on the poem Je Rame by French/Belgian poet Henri Michaux. It is a hex or curse directed at an unnamed source.