I am interested in ridiculousness. I embrace painting in its awesome, stoic powerlessness. Art in general works outside of mainstream social structures. In painting, this is the freedom to invent absurd situations that exist within a marginally believable picture plane — a freedom Katy Siegel has called “the luxury of incommensurability.” My love for the absurd rejects my upbringing as a child of clinicians, and my antithetical obsession with power chases my family’s military and political past. Unlike diagnoses or laws, jokes can steer humanity through emotional darknesses; comedy is empathy. By chasing the absurd and probing the psychological, in my art I hope to, as James Baldwin put it, “lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
