Portraits: 2003- Artist’s statement
[ Portraits: 2003 consists of small oil paintings on canvas board of my friends, family, and neighbors. These works depict fractions of daily life such as pouring tea, glancing up from a book, and turning to face the viewer. My paintings originate in photographs which I have taken attempting to capture the feeling of a moment, a part of the person’s glance, the essence of a space.

In this group of portraits I celebrate the habits and activities of common people. I communicate this through the quickness of my brushstrokes, the photographic vocabulary I use, the rich pallet of colors, and the sheer number of paintings in this collection. In the spirit of Walt Whitman’s poetry, my paintings revel in daily life. I chose my subjects, their angle of representation, their poses, settings, light sources and colors in order to create a body of work that will illuminate and celebrate the community of people and the banal moments that comprise my routine life.

In creating portraits that applaud daily life, I, like other contemporary portraitists, renovate the traditional western sixteenth and seventeenth century portrait associated with nobility, wealth and virtue. By using photographs, one of the first mechanically reproducible art forms as reference for my portraits, my paintings resonate in the world Walter Benjamin describes as “the age of mechanical reproduction.” The photograph is an art form of the twentieth century that has changed the class basis of representing the human figure. As Roland Barthes’ discuses in his study Camera Lucida, photography transformed the human figure from one which previously was intended as an “advertisement” of social or financial status to one which objectively depicts the human being without placing value on the individual being represented. Through photography my portrait-snapshots emphasize, not an aristocratic people and lifestyle in which the model has time to pose for hours at length, but the people and happenings that make up the habitual moments of my life. ]