Statement

In my Nightview series these two themes converge. Depicting the view from my window at night, the landscape recedes into darkness, overlaid by fragmented partial reflections of myself surrounded by my paintings. The window pane becomes a liminal threshold where interior and exterior merge. Here, the painted reflection is rendered 1:1 scale to collapse the distance between the viewer and the canvas, implicating the viewer in a 'theatre' of reflections where they occupy the protagonist's space.

The repetition of multiple partial-reflections suggests a circular rather than linear concept of time. The reflected self becomes an uncanny, displaced presence—no longer looking "out," but looking back at oneself as an object within one's own field of vision.

Painting is also a dialogue with art history; I draw deeply from Caspar David Friedrich’s work, particularly Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for its structural identification between the viewer and the figure looking out at an elusive reality, and Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas for its spatial construction that folds the viewer into the room. Ultimately, I aim to explore fragmented space and time through the figure in context, questioning the anthropocentrism so often inherent in representing the human form.

My art is born from a fascination with the act of looking—a quiet absorption of the world translated into the language of shape, tone, and color. My commitment to visual facts is an act of faith: rather than projecting my feelings onto the world, I allow the visible world to flow into me. In the stillness of observation, I draw deeply from experiences of music, film, photography, and literature to connect the visual and the internal.

While translating what I see, I do not deny the material surface of the canvas. Working to resolve the complexity of my subject over extended periods, I layer scumbled, glazed, and opaque color to build a dense, fine-grained surface. I consciously avoid the gestural mark; because a gesture fixes a single moment of execution, eliminating it allows the work to exist outside a finite sense of time.

I seek the sublime within the quotidian—that which transcends the human sphere and contrasts with our fragility.  The landscape and the figure are my primary subjects. The former is typified in my studies of sea and rocks, exploring a dialectic of movement and permanence unified by light. The latter appears in my portraits and self-portraits, an inquiry into the elusive nature of the self where each iteration asks the same question but reveals a different answer.