Statement

Experience for Experience's Sake

In my work, I am concerned with the direct aesthetic experience of a piece of art. I am a modern realist painter using traditional oil techniques with bold, often disruptive, color palettes. My subject matter is the quiet drama of life, the intense coiled energy and feeling of seemingly still moments. 

In our age where social media has dropped a veil of self consciousness over our lives, I believe an intense personal engagement with art is all the more vital. With the constant presence of cameras in our pockets and social media beckoning for posts, we are too often watching our lives from the outside, sifting through our days for cropped, curated, “instagramable” moments. Distracted by our anticipation of other people’s reaction to what we are seeing and doing, we reduce our ability to personally experience the world ourselves.

I invite the viewer into the private unselfconscious moments of the images in my paintings hoping to thereby give them their own private unfiltered experience of a viewer and an art object being viewed. 

Bio

I began my education with an undergraduate degree in Russian Language and Literature and a number of fine arts classes on the side. This led to working in a non-profit arts organization for Russian artists in Washington D.C. and later spending a year hanging out with artists and collectors in Moscow. I returned to school for a graduate degree in Russian Area Studies and later an M.F.A. in creative writing, after which I worked in Ukraine reorganizing collective farms into private businesses and wrote a novel about Russian artists in Moscow.

In 2018 I returned to my pursuit of art, taking classes at a small studio in Chicago and at one of the new online art schools. I set up a home studio in the basement, and developing my practice has been my primary focus ever since.​​