Phantom Caravan, 2017
These paintings are a search for lost cousins, forgotten uncles, and unknown fathers. The process of painting allows me to sift through my ideas about who they might have been. I make them up as I go, wiping and staining the surface of the canvas until a face feels familiar. They dance to help me remember. The finished painting is a collaboration between myself, their whispers and their moans. Their dance destabilizes certainty and makes us feel comfortable with fog. My marks, barely legible, flirt with abstraction and let the figures be unraveled. My painterly language is the spoken language of my ancestors--gibberish--and it is in this balderdash that we meet. My marks break, trip on themselves and cough up hairballs. How little can we get away with and still derive meaning from something? Can I take the eyeballs away and one will still know that it’s a face?
These paintings are a search for lost cousins, forgotten uncles, and unknown fathers. The process of painting allows me to sift through my ideas about who they might have been. I make them up as I go, wiping and staining the surface of the canvas until a face feels familiar. They dance to help me remember. The finished painting is a collaboration between myself, their whispers and their moans. Their dance destabilizes certainty and makes us feel comfortable with fog. My marks, barely legible, flirt with abstraction and let the figures be unraveled. My painterly language is the spoken language of my ancestors--gibberish--and it is in this balderdash that we meet. My marks break, trip on themselves and cough up hairballs. How little can we get away with and still derive meaning from something? Can I take the eyeballs away and one will still know that it’s a face?
