Statement

I remember drawing the rattlesnake my dad killed on Father’s Day, June 20, 1999.  I remember saving a drowning butterfly in July 2001, but that I stepped on it later that day. I remember painting my toenails purple on August 1, 2007.  I remember the hundreds of apples, pears, and apricots littering my family’s yard; filling buckets in our home and bags in our freezer; and rotting.  I remember the purple t-shirt emblazoned with a yellow kitty that I wore on Tuesday, March 31, 2009, the day my father died, and that I had drawn a dead rabbit on April 1, 1999, exactly ten years before his funeral.

Memory does not discriminate; whether the subject is small or monumental, it is worth remembering and therefore recording.  When I make art, I give the same level of attention and detail to the large works that consume a space as to the ones small enough to hold.  I work with personal stories that deal with broader concepts such as family, togetherness, loss, and empathy.  Oftentimes my subjects are animals.  My dad raised animals all his life and taught me to love them as he did.  To him, they were family more than any person could ever be.  Being close to animals made me feel close to my dad; but as personal as that is to me, anyone can understand it, long for their own caring relationships, and mourn losses.  These are the intimate, singular, yet universal feelings that I am interested in conveying.  Precision of craft is important to me, because the subjects I focus on merit careful treatment and respect.  So I sew clean seams, draw sharp lines, print rich colors, and don’t muck up my paper.  I commemorate “the little things” that have mattered, equating them with the monumental, and I hope what I have done is worthy of their memory.