Void Paintings, 2010 - 2011

In his article for the Huffington Post last year about my paintings of construction sites, arts writer John Seed wrote eloquently about our national compulsion to build: "As a nation we plan buildings--tangible symbols of progress--with great zeal, especially when the future and the economy feel uncertain... Whatever their flaws, ambitious commercial buildings are among America's greatest collective artistic creations, ready to contain our lives, the things we make, our possessions, and our passions."

It's not surprising, then, that in the wake of a national tragedy like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, our immediate response is to rebuild, to erase the architectural scars that remind us of the horrific event, and to demonstrate our enduring spirit to the world. While this urge is understandable--necessary, even--it offers an imperfect form of healing. A void remains: all the lost lives that can't be rebuilt.

This February, I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon photographing the World Trade Center reconstruction site. I was particularly moved to see the 9/11 Memorial. Even in its incomplete state, buried under a foot of new snow, it impressed me. What I find profound about the Memorial design is that it acknowledges our collective loss, giving physical form to an absence that will never leave us.

My recent paintings are all about absence and longing. Some are quiet, contemplative scenes from re-construction sites--both in New York and New Orleans--where work has come to a temporary standstill. Other canvasses depict (non)views through generic hotel room windows. The vacancy of these spaces is palpable, and the overall mood of the work is subdued.

Many of the images feature thresholds; in addition to the windows, there are doorways, tunnels, holes. These are liminal zones, where one might pass from one space or state of being to another, but often a curtain, screen, or reflective surface interferes, holding the viewer back at the point of transition.

Transition is thus presented as a continuous state.

We are ever in flux.

Construction Paintings, 2005 - 2010

For a number of years, until 2005, I painted aerial views of suburban sprawl. In my recent work, I have "zoomed in," to focus on individual tract homes and commercial structures captured in a state of partial construction. These new paintings explore the building process and, in it, find a metaphor for the activity of painting. I hope to draw a connection between the construction of a building out of raw materials (lumber, steel, and concrete) and the construction of a picture out of raw materials (paint, canvas, wood).

My paintings are informed both by three-dimensional architectural space and by the pictorial "space" of twentieth century Modernist painting. The generic forms of suburban architecture provide a convenient framework through which I explore the basic structures and issues of geometric abstraction -- stripes, grids, flatness vs. depth, color relativity, and so forth. Many of my recent works are marked by distinct moments of visual rupture, where the picture as a whole becomes fragmented. I am applying paint to the surface in any number of incongruent ways, juxtaposing various painting "styles," leaving sections of the painting support unpainted, and otherwise undermining the potential for illusionistic space. This disruption of the viewer's experience is disorienting, but in a good way, for it enables the viewer to see the picture with fresh eyes - to see the picture itself as a construction. The underlying structure of the image is revealed, like the skeletal frame of a building.

At this point, my work is only peripherally about suburbia. Tract homes and strip malls provide the fodder for the paintings and help to place them in a specific cultural moment in time, but the work is ultimately about paint and the nature of pictures. To the extent that my paintings still comment on suburbia, it is through the moments of visual rupture described above, which may be interpreted as revealing cracks in the suburban American dream.