I feel powerless in my attempt to escape my human limits. My entire life I have been striving to step out of myself to be more and understand more. I've been trying be the “Spock,” a character who for me personifies rational decision-making. However, at every attempt, I have come to realize that as a feeling being, I cannot be intellectual and rational in the way I would like to be. In painting, I ask my models to put on a mask and wear the Spock persona to visually explore this undertaking.
As an observational painter, it’s important for the image to travel through me, from eyes to hands. That slow meditative observing, as opposed to the instantaneousness of photography, involves time with the model absorbing them as a person, and time making collective color and mark decisions. I am going for more than an instant in time, I want a piece of each person in the finished painting. I want to work to show the utilization of the whole stretch of time that person sacrificed in order to be painted.
On the canvas when I have a figure realized, I feel like I’ve made a new friend, familiar as they have my model’s bodies but changed with their strange heads. In their Spock roles, they become my confidants, a silent army of creatures that are having a similar struggle to my own.