Artist Statement

My art practice entails both comics and painting. I wish to bring my favorite elements from each into a new form that pushes narrative in painting into a different mode, and expands the storytelling of comics with tools not available on a printed page.

As I continue to study both disciplines, I find many touch points between the two that seem under-explored and under-celebrated. From the dual life of Feininger, to the appropriations by Lichtenstein, to the funny-paper sources buried in de Kooning’s early masterpieces, to the collage-compositions of Kitaj and Hockney, to painters such as Sue Williams, Cy Twombly, Joseph Solman, and Leland Bell who have kinship to comics’ visuals or play with its mechanisms, whether consciously or not, this is to my mind a rich vein of ideas. I sense that there is a way to fruitfully meld these two disciplines together. The two traditions overlap at odd angles and I’ve been studying by practice the traditional workings of both to understand best how to put them together. 

Exploring the two disciplines makes me ask myself if it is possible to create a set of rules that will allow me to work in the same visual structure for both painting and comics. But the contrasting principles of each…or perhaps the contrasting goals of each…seem to butt against each other and stymie my efforts. Nevertheless, I have a strong intuition that in attempting to overcome my own mental blocks and the traditions of each medium, I may arrive at something interesting.

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