Cocoons and Mobile Homes: My work has always been about finding a balance between the personal and cultural as well as integrating these concerns within an art historical context. I rely extensively on a computer based method of working using Flash to create still images which are used as models from which I create exact larger scaled painted replicas.

I am interested in the interface between computer generated imagery, literature, non- linear narrative and its relationship to painting. I create components for the work which become characters. These characters are in the form of human cocoons, bee hives, crows, lambs, dwellings, lotus flowers, rust on the side of a steel mill, etc. They are culled from hand drawn imagery, photographs, and art historical sources. I use these characters and construct non-linear narratives about the human condition, especially interested in the life cycle. What is death and what happens next -- a philosophical and religious question that I tackle with the latter part of the series by combining western and eastern religious symbols. At times the work becomes very personal but remains grounded in an abstract language; cool, super smooth surfaces with barely a trace of the hand in the making. Reflecting the computer age where the monitor shapes our visual paradigm and also mimics the disconnected impersonal quality of computer mediated communication. It examines the life cycle and what happens after we die, so, the paintings progress through a series of stories eventually leading to a fictional place called heaven. The work has become a meditation on death and spirituality.

Death is inevitable and the deterioration that goes along with aging. As I move into middle age, participated in the production of the next generation, seeing my offspring develop and mature I have begun to examine my own mortality and also of loved ones; older parents, aging siblings, friends, etc. and how this process of aging impacts me. The shell of a body that is shed, how we are housed in the body or the living quarters, how does the house act as the shell that we carry with us? What does home mean and how does it relate to our physical home of our body? I can remember when a good friend of mine who has played and written music most of his life came up with a song at a relatively young age called Living in a State of Decay. That lyric sung or should I say shouted over and over has somehow come back to me as I cycle through life. The ability to change and reinvent ourselves, this is what I am exploring in this series Cocoons and Mobile Homes, a metaphor for death, metamorphosis, rebirth, and memory.