The face and body have been a continuous presence in my work for as long as I have been making art. The works gathered here do not constitute a series. They are part of an ongoing practice of looking, drawing, painting, and investigating life experience and human presence.
Many begin simply with observation. I draw and paint life experience and faces from life, sometimes quickly and sometimes through sustained looking. I am interested not only in likeness, but in what happens through the act of looking itself. A face is never entirely still. Expression shifts, attention changes, light alters what we perceive, and our own relationship to the person before us becomes part of what we see.
Other works move away from direct observation. Faces and bodies may be remembered, imagined, fragmented, altered, abstracted, or reconstructed. At times the figure becomes less an individual person than a territory through which I can investigate perception, identity, embodiment, memory, and the relationship between interior and exterior experience.
I think of these works as research, although not research in the conventional sense. They are a form of visual inquiry. I do not necessarily know what I am looking for when I begin. Drawing and painting become ways of discovering what I could not have formulated beforehand.
This ongoing investigation continually enters my other work. A face observed from life may eventually contribute to a painting in which the face becomes pattern. A gesture, anatomical structure, expression, or unexpected mark may reappear years later in an entirely different context. Ideas migrate. Images accumulate. One experience becomes the material for another.
For this reason, I have never regarded these works as peripheral studies or preliminary exercises. They belong to the same interconnected practice as my more formally defined bodies of work. They are part of the underlying process through which those bodies of work become possible.
The human face remains especially compelling to me because it is simultaneously extraordinarily familiar and ultimately unknowable. From infancy, we learn to search faces for recognition, emotion, intention, danger, affection, and connection. Yet no matter how carefully we look, the visible surface can never fully reveal the person within.
The body presents a related mystery. It is the physical structure through which we encounter the world, but it is also experienced from within. We are simultaneously bodies that can be observed and beings who inhabit those bodies. Objects in our environment that have been part of our actual experience in a sense are an ’embodiment’ from my perspective.
These works occupy that space between observation and interpretation, between the person seen and the person imagined, between the physical surface and the experience that cannot be seen.
They are not a series with a beginning or an end.
They are an ongoing inquiry.
