From John Street to Union

I have been making paintings constructed loosely from my experience of walking about one mile each morning from my apartment in Fox Point to my studio in downtown Providence, and of walking back each night. My goal is to rediscover the feeling of these outdoor places—their lights, atmospheres, colors, and topographies—through the process of painting inside the studio. As such, the visual representations of these paintings are not straight-forward and objective, but oblique and affective. I hope that these works draw one’s attention to the idiosyncrasies of natural life and to the particularities of weather. I want the paintings to engage the mysteries of glimpsing, remembering, and reprocessing—of recording a series of moments that, once experienced, begin immediately and inexorably to slip from one’s grasp. The paintings often incorporate people, who are also ideated. I think of these figures and faces, in part, as metaphors for painting itself. When we look at paintings, we “face” them. In some way they mirror our own faces and look back at us. My figures often look at one another and hail one another. Sometimes they seem to think or speak silently, doing so not through words, but through a kind of abstract paint-language of colored marks. In staging these exchanges and thought processes along the picture’s surface, I think I am asking: is real contact possible, whether through language or through paint