The Importance of Family

My work explores family, memory, identity, and everyday experience through recurring characters drawn from my own life. These characters often represent my daughter, my dog, and myself, but they also become symbols that move between personal narrative, imagination, and art history.

My work begins from a background in craft. Before pursuing art, I worked as a union electrician, learning through repetition, problem-solving, and the discipline of skilled labor. That experience still shapes how I approach making. I see art as something built over time—through study, experimentation, and a commitment to developing a personal language.

The paintings in The Importance of Family developed through drawing, collage, and repeated visual studies. Collage became a turning point in my process, allowing images to shift, combine, and evolve in unexpected ways. What began as experimentation led to a body of work centered around two recurring figures—the Girl and the Dog—drawn from my own life but existing within a space between memory, imagination, and invention.

These characters are rooted in personal experience. My daughter and my dog became a source of stability and meaning during a long period of recovery following a serious accident. Through the work, I place them in imagined environments—sometimes playful, sometimes strange—where ordinary moments are reinterpreted through color, distortion, and narrative. The images are not literal, but they remain grounded in connection, memory, and the search for something positive.

Influences from modern painting, comics, and collage appear throughout the work, but they are reinterpreted rather than referenced directly. Line, color, and fragmentation are used to build figures that shift in identity and form. The characters continue to evolve, reflecting an ongoing process of searching and redefinition.

At its core, this work is about finding meaning in everyday life—about family, identity, and emotional balance. While the imagery can be exaggerated or humorous, it is driven by a desire to create something honest, and to offer a moment of recognition or reflection for the viewer.