My work is concerned with both concepts of representation in the discourse of painting and in the mythologies constructed by film and television, and how these mythologies affect personal experience and public space.
The earlier paintings together represent a survey of the landscape of Los Angeles, as seen through the lens of the camera. The effect of the lens mythologizes the landscape and provides its own narrative quality, heightened by the images' translation into paint. By painting these images, which are based on photographs I take from my own experience, I hope to construct a parallel world which points to reality, but is obscured by the lens, romanticized through light effects, enhanced color, and surface texture. Los Angeles is the perfect backdrop for this exploration, being the seat of myth, television and cinema, film being the lens through which the Los Angeles landscape is represented and understood.
The later paintings (the "Extras" series, 2005-) incorporate figures into these landscapes. Like extras in a movie set, they exist as compositional devices, no more important than their surroundings. There is a feeling of alienation or detachment from the image as the figures remain anonymous and distant, yet float uncomfortably close to the viewer.
I am interested in exploring a type of photorealism based on the idea of the photograph as a medium of manipulation rather than as documentary. With the widespread use of Photoshop and the malleable quality of digital photography, the photograph has lost its status of authenticity and becomes another veil that obscures truth. Here painting becomes the medium of authenticity, manifested in its status as a unique, handmade object with a tangible connection to its maker, and sitting in opposition to the fleeting nature of technology and mass production.
The paintings masquerade as photographs, but are in fact extremely concerned with the formal and structural aspects of painting. I use a multi-layered drybrushing technique that mimics the signature qualities of film photography. The blur effect is accomplished through a slow buildup of layers of paint, rather than the act of dragging a brush across a wet painting as an act of removal, as seen in the work of Gerhardt Richter. It is important to me that the painting shows signs of labor, that the areas of color are built up rather than homogenized. This technique communicates a certain presence or substance, and preserves a luminosity which mimics the effect of the cinematic experience. (Please note when viewing slides of this work that the paintings tend to flatten a little in reproduction, and some of the tactile aspects of the paintings get lost in translation.)