At the end of every day in my studio, I scrape up unused paint and put it at the edge of my palette thinking I may use it at a later point. I rarely do. Piles form along the perimeter of my palette like unmixed totems of color. I have become fascinated with them. They have been lingering in my studio and in my head for years. They have finally arrived.

My last body of paintings revolved around a narrative in which children respond to a lack of direction and turn against the adult world. Now, the children are back but they face a new and more immediate enemy… Paint itself.

The piles of paint show up in my work in a variety of incarnations. Sometimes they appear as actual amalgams of paint squeezed directly from the tube, sometimes they take on a more graphic appearance, and at other times they emerge in a more naturalistic iteration, painted in an illusionistic way as if these piles truly exist as entities in our world. And at last, they have begun to materialize in the space of our room as sculptures on the floor or on the wall.

In the environment of my paintings, the piles serve as reminders of the fragility, instability and magic of creation. They are the unknown incarnate. They are the stuff of which the children and their world are made. At a point in time during which painting as a means of communication and expression may no longer be relevant to the broader society, these paint piles beg us to consider the fact of their impotence. Faced with the threat of oil painting being or becoming obsolete, the children in my paintings lug around the piles awaiting further direction..

Within the paintings, the threat is immediate, the question is literal. Beyond their world, the piles signify a further dilemma. They represent the accrued matter of our pasts, our histories, our traditions, our rituals and loyalties … our baggage. It is as if the perceived threat against painting is a threat against humanity itself. Paintings recall a time in the west when religion, literature, and intimacy reigned. In today’s computer-driven world, the priority rests on interconnectivity, global community, a greater organism. The characters in my work ask, “Where do we belong? Is there a place for us? Is there a place for this? For painting? For tradition? Can we, must we erase it all? How do we reconcile the richness of this inheritance with its apparent obsolescence? Our vulnerability to sentiment with a world that seems to want only to move forward at all costs?”