The pandemic changed my work. I lost my job and – like a lot of people – I started walking. I live in Georgetown, where neighborhoods not regulated by HOAs butt up against industrial zoning. Individual expression is visible everywhere; landscapes evolve and change like a living organism. Over months, I took pictures of everything - train yards, randomly discarded items, people in public, homes, cars, yards, gardens, row upon row of dumpsters-in-formation, impossibly-scaled post-apocalyptic machinery, and massive dump sites – strange, beautiful, even sublime in the smoky orange light of the world on fire.

I had been working in pencil and gouache for years, but returned to oil paint to capture the depth, texture and bleary-eyed richness of 2020, 2021, 2022…

I started the first painting of my newest work - Fever Dream - using images from my walks, and a technique I hadn’t used in many years – image-to-canvas transfer. I spent 18 months painting it, and some smaller satellite pieces – broken by an unexpected interlude to paint another piece, Open Heart.

I learned I needed to have a fairly major surgery in June of 2022. The surgery itself and the recovery were fine, but I was left with a sense of incomprehensible vulnerability. I couldn’t stop thinking of the voluntary-forced release of agency, to be wheeled into a room and put to sleep, having granted strangers permission to remove parts of my inner body. I thought of a frog – dissected, open, helpless, exposed – and I painted it. Making that painting brought into focus two themes of my work: 1. how images of “the abject” and images of “beauty” share so many formal attributes – like circulatory systems and trees - glistening beet roots, watermelon, jewels, and gore, and 2. the oppressive overwhelm of contradictory feelings.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera observes that “kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence”. I think that’s right and it’s not my project to make kitsch. I think that beauty can only be fully experienced through the high relief of adjacency to its opposite - complex, intimate and inextricable.