About the paintings

I believe that a painting, like a poem, can be experienced at once, without mediation.  A painting does not pretend to reveal history as it happened, but it can tell a story as it is remembered. An image, especially a painted image, does not offer objective truth, but a series of subjective ones. As a painter it is my job to bear witness. 

I start with photographs—historical and contemporary—that depict tragic, violent, even horrific events. The only common denominators are the people caught up in these tragedies, and that their pain and grief have been recorded for posterity. Photographed, they enter the realm of objective history. As such, the viewer can distance themselves, can see, but avoid feeling. We see so much, after all, that it can be numbing. 

Memory is a process of layering. New experiences can obscure, even transform older ones. Memory is written over and over, but the erasure is never complete. The absent continually seeps back into the present. That is also how I approach my painting. Each painting results from a process of erasure. I paint and then erase what I have painted. Layers build up from my painting and erasing, painting and erasing.

My paintings, I hope, return their subjects to a subjective, human reality. The people I paint—victims of crime, civilian victims of war or terrorism, soldiers—become not objects but memories. They feel real because we feel that we remember them.