I am a maker, a believer, and a seer.

Growing up in the south, I lived on a dairy farm. Most of my early childhood centered around creating things from scratch. Whether it was a seed that grew into a tomato plant that we harvested, ate and sold, or a newborn calf that grew up to produce milk and raise calves of her own, my life was about creating things. It only seemed natural to become a creator. Making paintings was a natural extension of who I was. For me, creating a world to share with the community was like planting a seed in the ground and watching it grow. Over the years I have done lots of things besides paint. All of them could be summed up under the header of “maker” (For example, being an entrepreneur is a maker of companies) however, nothing embodies the true essence of my role as a creator more than making paintings. I love the process: the smell of the oil and turpentine, the evolution of the image on a flat, blank surface, nurturing the image out of nothingness. Alongside my family, painting is who I am.

Farmers have a great deal of faith. For many years I thought this was because of how embedded the church is in our day to day culture here. However, as I matured, I came to understand the need for a maker of things to have “faith” that the end result will be productive. So many things can come between the process and the end result, whether a drought or a giant rainstorm, timing is imperative and in many ways completely out of your control. When I make paintings, I too must have faith in the end result. I often loose control of the image, sometimes completely scraping down the painting before allowing it to re-emerge from the surface. This weaving of faith and paint extends to the image itself. For me, it is impossible to simply allow a painting to emerge from some abstract sense of fate, rather, I extend pictures and ideas to the community, which are grown from my years of faith. It is said that the south has more churches than grocery stores, and indeed much of the culture here revolves around the church. The culture has informed my work, almost subconsciously, into a belief in transcendent truth, a trust in the mystical extensions of life. By making these images, I hope for hope, and an “age of interconnectivity” that goes beyond just our world, and into some future world that we do not yet know.

I believe that it is our role as artists to see this mystical world here and now. In many ways each of us catch glimpses of it throughout our day. Whether through some deja vu experience, or through a  dream, or some strange intuition to call a friend only to find they are going through a personal tragedy. We all experience the mystical in our lives. For the Jungian, this will lead to a presumption that we live in a synchronous world of intertwined energy. For me, this leads to my hope of the future world. I paint what I see. Sometimes this means that I simply paint an apple on a table, but more often the result is a portrait, or a figure in some space that is natural but clearly altered by this “otherworld” reality. I know this vision of what painting is (or should be) is not a popular one. It is, however, the way that I see.