Teeter Totter

For as long as I can remember I've been arranging shapes and playing with space. It began with sidewalk chalk and found objects arranged on the cement to create elaborate spaces. Then cannibalizing my grandma's architectural digest magazines and inventing new layouts on cheap lined paper with mountains of scotch tape. Eventually I graduated to tablets of graph paper filled with hypothetical layout problems and imaginary house plans. I even practiced rearranging my bedroom once a week and made custom bedding to match different color schemes created from my Home Depot paint chip collection. All of these experiments helped me to better understand space, proportion, color, and composition. Eventually I found the proper medium for my fascination and began to paint. I'm still obsessed with arranging shapes but the problems have become more complex. I'm most concerned with balancing beauty/likeness with mistakes/flaws in the same painting. I was initially drawn to vintage family photos because style of the clothing, architecture, and automobiles featured in these images. I quickly realized my simultaneous attraction and repulsion with paint was mirroring an emotional reaction prompted by these images. There is a likeness of an image- maybe not the one we remember. The past can be trivialized, dramatized, and idealized. Some of our most beloved and pleasant memories may be corrupted with sadness or embarrassment. For me the beauty lives in the contrast between this aesthetic or emotional relationship.