"We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions - waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking - that all impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur..."

- C.S. Lewis

            My work is about capturing and painting the moment in which a person is unaware of his or her expression or even presence- the moment when the unconscious mind allows an individual to expose his or her personality through gesture. I am interested not only in one's gesticulation, but also subtle moments of body language, specifically hand to face, which help to portray this person.  These quiet, and usually intimate moments make up the background of our contact as human beings.  They comprise the fleeting moments of a conversation that fade into the background of our overall communication-temporal moments that are forgotten once the message is delivered.   Isolating these moments and painting them larger than life gives them relevance and permanence.  Taking this very personal, non-glamorized index of expressions and using it to create a portrait of someone when he or she is at this stage of unawareness is the basis for my work.

            Every person has a particular repertoire of movements and expressions which helps distinguish his or her pattern of communication. To know true intimacy with another human being is to be able to read one's implicit body language and to recognize how someone expresses him or herself through gesture. I want to engulf the viewer in these moments that are often forgotten - warning not to forget these sometimes vulnerable, intimate moments that we share with those around us, thus resisting this "blur" of expressions and gestures.    

            By painting these portraits at such a large size, I intend to create a contemplative piece of artwork, which will, ironically, allow the viewer to consider a fleeting moment over a much longer amount of time.  My brushwork thus becomes integral to this idea. I want to make the behavior of the paint as important to one's attention as the subject and composition.  In doing this the painting will become something to contemplate, not only in terms of subject matter but also in terms of craft. When examined up close, I want the painting to appear as if made up of many smaller, abstract compositions that come together to create one overall meaning when viewed as a whole. The parallel of these smaller vignettes of paint to the often ignored moments that make up our existence becomes apparent when one spends time looking at the work. I am trying to take temporal and often unnoticed moments and make them permanent and unavoidable, thereby making them extraordinary.