Lately I’ve been using oil pastel on unprimed canvas, either stretched over panels or over stretcher bars for bigger paintings. I’d say my work is a sort of uncanny extension of the landscape genre. I usually start with a photo I took of a real place, often one that is personal to me in some way. In the process of developing the image, the “real” external setting gradually merges with an internal one as I inject it with my own invented mythology, a lexicon of recurring objects and humanoid, quadrupedal creatures. Finding the creatures’ forms has been like putting figuration and self portraiture in a blender in the hopes of finding some hidden essence. I guess that’s what I’m looking for in my work, a way to peel back the skin of everyday existence and see what’s underneath.

When I try to put my finger on that I often draw a blank, but some people and things which have been floating around in my head are Miyazaki, Bob Thompson, romanticism, medieval tapestries, Christina Quarles, melancholy, Bonnard, Don't Look Now and other horror movies, Pan's Labyrinth, the Divine Comedy, music, the uncanny, bacchanals, the house where my mother grew up, memory, anxiety, Americana, death, adolescence, water, the pastoral, the desert, the sublime, Bosch, Paris, Texas.