My love of painting has something to do with recreating patterns I see around me: for example, the way a road will strike up a relationship with the power lines overhead and their shadows on the surface of the road; or the shifting relationships of distant trees and those in the foreground when you're taking a hike through the woods.

Paintings have the distinction of being "all at once," rather than having a beginning, middle and end like music and literature.  You see a painting in total, and then make a choice of what part to focus on and which direction to move your eyes around the canvas.  This allows the possibility of presenting different things simultaneously.   I often put different perspectives in one painting (e.g., looking down from a balcony and across the street simultaneously) - and I've recently taken that a step further and started putting multiple images on one canvas.  The relationships that develop between the subjects are unpredictable.

The first multiple image painting I did was Variations on Route 90, created from photos I took on a drive across the country.  The various vanishing points developed their own patterns when they were set down near each other on the canvas.  The shifting angles of the receding roads made a faceted surface when they joined each other on the canvas.  I've been looking for more of these surprise relationships; most recently in the Antique Heads and Sparrows.

My interest is to make art that provides a puzzle of real space.  Space is converted into something like a Rube Goldberg machine, where movement is reconstructed as hinges and levers on the canvas.  The subjects are secondary.  Even in a portrait, I am most interested in the way the person is part of their context and has an infinite variety of relationships with every detail of their personal landscape. 

I think, at their very best, my paintings balance between representing something of the world, and abstracting  a bit of the kaleidoscope of form, independent of its identity as a thing or person, just all shifting pattern.