BIOGRAPHY
I will begin my second year as a Master of Fine Arts painting student this August at New Mexico State University. I received my Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2005.
In my work I use expressive and dense mark making to evoke the rich psychological environments of children. I manipulate family snapshots taken of children to create my compositions. The mood and psychological workings of individual children are the subject matter.
The children in the images experience emotion deeply but lack the intellectual development to separate from their solipsistic understanding of the world. Both the environment and figure are rendered expressively in charcoal or paint, constructing a tangible world inseparable from the imagination and mood of its subject. I portray playtime by literally depicting the imaginary actions of toys. The world of imagination thus finds itself on the same plane of existence as the mundane. The snapshots I work from could be found in any family photo album, but the way in which the scene is rendered evokes something of a place outside physical reality. By referencing the familiar, I want the viewer to be reminded of their own childhood as they think about new generations of children. The general composition is chosen by an adult, but the imaginative rendering of the space creates a dreamlike mood atypical of snapshots. The images ultimately depict private imaginative moments of children to be witnessed by the estranged adult eye.
