MEMORY IS CENTRAL to my paintings. The painting process itself is strongly tied to memory, as each mark is the record – memory – of a gesture. Each gesture, then, is made in response to a thought or impulse that lies within the painter. Whether that thought or impulse evolves fully within the painter’s own mind or is a reaction to something seen (a chair, a person, a photograph), the process of translating a concept into paint requires memory. Even the fraction of a second it takes to look between that which is seen and that which will become (i.e., the blank canvas) requires that the painter retain the memory of that object, and at times, its minutiae: an exact curve, a precise glint of light, the deepeningshadow. Painting is many things, some specific to the painter and some universal to the craft, but I approach my personal painting practices as an exercise in the complexity of memory. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as my work has evolved my subject matter more often than not revolves around ephemera. I often paint from my own family photograph albums, a practice that’s taught me just how much the informal snapshot reveals about the endless intrigue of human relationships. There is a certain otherworldly thrill in the mind’s time travel as I stare for hours at an image that records a hundredth of a second that happened 10, 30, 100 years ago. The following painting was made of a snapshot of my sister and her friends during field day races at their middle school in 1983.
