My painting presents a brutalist perspective of the body in heightened, melodramatic states. I am interested in depicting banal subjects as elevated and allegorical, in which representations often refer to their own physicality and – through the gestural application of paint – the nature of painting.

The visceral and emotive approach toward my paintings stems largely in part from a cathartic incident in 2008, in which I was a victim of a hate-crime assault. In the aftermath of this period I became fascinated by ideas surrounding masculinity and began exploring the correlation between bodily fluids (namely blood, puss) and the physical properties of paint.

Most of my work since has engaged a dialogue of sexuality, identity, and a confrontation of the conceptual understanding of self/other. Through my treatment of form and content, I ask the viewer to consider the technical aspects of my paintings (colour, shape, substance, and composition), the metaphorical role that media assumes in my work, and finally the relationship of my paintings to a greater narrative and mythology, in which each subject is related to ideas of sexuality, pyschology, and convalescence. As a result, my work often uses personal history to approach universal themes, and a politics that I view as deeply personal, yet resoundingly human.

The work I have been completing recently challenges substance versus symbolism as integral to the reading of the work. Currently, my painting depicts figures in which the oily, silky qualities of paint reference a painterly fleshiness akin to the nature of the subject itself, predominating the paint as the fundamental, metaphorical avenue to approach the works, referring to (or despite) their highly sexualized and homoerotic nature.

This work seeks  duality to distance itself from its literal foundation to engage with an exploration of color, reduction of forms, and triumph of substance as seductive, overt, and playful. By reducing the literalness of the image in preference of a sensual painted surface, I hope to create work that engages with a continuously forming language of painting and representation.

While my previous painting work was a direct response to the aforementioned assault, it is my desire to re-approach painting as a medium to explore different notions of identity and self, including thematic ideas of narcissism, doppelgangers, and technically (and primarily) abstraction. By exploring the history of the painted subject as well as ideas surrounding figurative and abstract painting, I attempt to subvert specific art-historical tropes, pairing traditional subject matter with contemporary (technical) ideas of ambivalence, substance, and playfulness.

I approach idealist views of youth and beauty imbued conscientiously, honestly, and self-awarely by drawing attention to the purely tangible properties of paint itself and pulling the viewer away from the sutures of the represented subject. It is my goal to draw attention to the painterly and the formal, predominating the medium as integral to the understanding and formation of my work, and referencing painting as both 'act' and 'medium'.