Assistant Professor, Drawing

M.F.A. State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000
B.A. Yale College, 1990

In my studio work I explore theatrical narratives. Much of my work has focused on the nuclear family. In austere figurative presentations, ranging from generic figurines to specific images of my own family, I explore some of the fears, attachments, isolations and attractions within this micro society. Solo exhibits on this theme have included Parental Geography, Family Secrets, and My Only Son, a series on the Abraham and Isaac story in the Hebrew Bible. I have also exhibited in group shows on the family theme – Family Album in San Francisco, and In Its Own Way in New York City.
I've been working with the still-life genre for more than a decade now. There's something appealing to me about the overt contrivance of a tableau, the fact that the artist not only renders the image, but also arranges and chooses the objects in the picture. I feel like this emphasis on subjectivity, the artifice of the presentation, is strangely honest.
For my most recent solo exhibition (at R.B. Stevenson Gallery in San Diego, California) I painted tableaux of figurines, which I arranged with oversized, distorted foods. I have long been intrigued by toy figures, which lie somewhere between person and thing. A plastic figure wears its stereotype on its sleeve; there is no pretense of it having the particularity of a real person. A figurine is a myth or an archetype, but making a painting of a plastic statuette gives that generalization uniqueness.
I am experimenting with where and how identification happens.  What level of specificity or generalization moves us the most? To what extent is our reception of a painting emotional, and how much of it is intellectual? Can realism and symbolism comfortably coexist?
I’ve been influenced by the works of dead artists like Titian, Rembrandt, Breugel, Chardin, Balthus, Picasso, and Morandi, and contemporary artists like Lucian Freud, Eric Fischl, and Jenny Saville. I’m happy to be participating in the long tradition of painting, and I’m optimistic about its future. In a culture filled with mechanically produced and reproduced images, people thirst for hand-made, physical, subjective pictures. Painting is a medium particularly suited – in its malleability and its labor-intensity – for transmitting compelling expressions of individuals.