CHROMATIC DRAMATICS

I’ve always painted tough people in rough places. The people are working class. The places are outside of mainstream society, removed from the coastal centers of wealth and power, where eccentric things occur because no one cares. Showing an epic story through scenes of the overlooked, these works hint at the pervasive anomie that defines post-industrial America. In the past, these latent dramas were depicted in pictures where not much happened, like a Jim Jarmusch movie, or a darker version of Edward Hopper. This seemed true to life, because most of life is like that – a stream of daily routines and struggles. But as we know, life can suddenly get dramatic and that is where Chromatic Dramatics now resides. As implied above, the paintings in this series are of people living on the fringes of civilization. The action represented does not just hint at, but often depicts important moments – a celebratory toast, a convenience store hold-up, the discovery of something long buried. Even scenes of relative quietude carry an apparent significance, such as a man wandering through the desert carrying everything he has in the world. Either way, dull or dramatic, Chromatic Dramatics is a series that strives for a balance between visual power and social truth. With potent color, radiant light and symbolic gestures, these paintings attempt to reenergize representational painting and make it compete with the spectacles of the digital age we’re in. It just so happens that this increased intensity might also be a fitting representation of a world that’s gone mad.