My work explores the implications, limitations and individual perceptions of taste, beauty and excess in both art and culture, while simultaneously embracing my interests in overindulgence, visual complexity and ornamentation. It is a romantic and celebratory exploration into personal ideals of the beautiful, and the play that exists between the natural and the artificial. I have always been attracted to the eccentric, the gaudy, and the thin and ever changing line that separates (and sometimes blends together) the attractive from the repulsive and the beautiful from the ugly.
I locate beauty in the grotesque, the freakish and the unusual. This is the darker side of beauty. The side that speaks of time passing, inevitable demise and decay. I draw inspiration from the 17th Century Flemish Vanitas paintings which served as reminders that the power, the pleasures, even the beauty of this earthly life are transient compared to that which meets us after death.
I create works that utilize real objects, paint as paint and paint as object to form unabashedly theatrical, overly “sweet” (often repulsive) and somewhat sinister works that express my own visions and ideals of beauty and decay. These concepts of beauty, decay and death continue to complement each other and coexist in my work just as they do in the day to day real world around us.
