Urban Allegories

Sometimes art should not be pleasant. Sometimes it should make you stop, look, and refuse to look away.

These paintings are inspired by Seattle but every city that has learned to mistake abundance for virtue. Ships arrive overfull. The cranes unload without pause. More, more, more — more arriving, more accumulating, more destined for people who do not really need it.

And on the edges of all that plenty, people wait; denied the bounty destined for hearth and home. A child's toy. An exotic ingrediants for a meal to be shared with friends. A warm pair of socks to fight the chill of a rainy afternoon. Small things. Ordinary things. Things destined for those who already have enough, yet remain perpetually out of reach for those who do not.

Aberrant scribbles, elusive symbols, and crude pictograms comprise what I call a deceptive primitivism: a language of the overlooked, built from the visual residue of the forgotten. Contrasting scales and shifting focal points force the viewer to locate themselves within the scene — to decide, consciously, where they are standing in relation to the feast and the famine occupying the same canvas.

Passing with indifference is a choice. These paintings make that choice harder to make.