Home > Biography > Artist's Statement

I love to work from figures because I love the human form, in its various shapes and contortions. I'm always seeing something new in my subjects, and each new blank canvas is a challenge.

Be it a live model or a glass of wine, I work almost exclusively from life. I enjoy the immediacy of the experience, and there are details if color, shape, light, musculature, and expression that you can't get from a photograph. With a few of the figure paintings and the Lilies print, I referred to photographs to help inform me when I took the painting back to the studio. When working in the studio without the subject, I strive to maintain the original observations and energy of the painting.

My influences range from Renaissance to modern. I draw on the Italian Masters, the great figurative painters Degas, Tuke, Sargent, and Cassatt and the more painterly Cezanne and JMW Turner. I am always learning and relearning painting when I see their works, and I am homesick for a view of Turner's "Slave Ship" at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. My two greatest influences are the Baroque painter Caravaggio and my first painting instructor Jerome Witkin. From theme to composition to color, these two men inform every figure painting I've approached since 1994. A reproduction of Caravaggio's "Saint John in the Wilderness" hangs in my apartment. It is unquestionably my favorite painting in the world. And it is in homage that I present my own Saint John here today.

"Saint John" is only one of the several paintings here that draw on a Christian theme. Adam and Eve, Magdalene, Pietà Daydream, and Young Francis, in Thought all call on my Italian/Irish Catholic upbringing, as well as my reverence for the Italian Masters and the several hundred years of church-funded high European art that they inspired. While I am no longer a practicing Catholic, I am still inspired by the church's better virtues which we seem to sometimes forget in our daily lives (and in our policy making).