I employ inanimate objects to make surrogate portraits, genre scenes and landscape paintings. Working from both direct observation and photographs , I paint set-up, found and invented still lifes. While mimicking the real world, I stage every detail.
Working with traditional oil painting techniques, I pay close attention to materiality, space, light and atmosphere. I replicate a familiar expression, place or scene to entice the viewer into this proxy world, to actively decipher what they see.
For my current series of paintings, ‘Inanimate Portraits’, I arrange, then paint mass produced porcelain figurines and toys to capture likeness, human character and poses. The props I choose are common and familiar-without value (monetary, physical, cultural) and rarely scrutinized. I pay homage to the anonymous artisans who created the originals and hand painted the casts, each imbued with the history of its use-the same but every one different.
Mining the gap between recognition and distance, I look for connections between the material world and our psyche. I seek beauty, pathos and meaning in the quiet extended observation of the things around us. By slowing down, we experience the richness and value of what is lost in plain sight.