The world is essentially mysterious. I am amazed at the human capacity to feel great resonances with bits of the external world while, ultimately, no one can perceive that world objectively outside the tint of his or her unique perception, and it is utterly indifferent to our captivation.

I am drawn to the potential outcomes unique to the act of painting. It is tempting to boil realist painting down to, at best, one’s most convincing mimicry of a personal fiction, for representational paintings are, foundationally, fictions. “Representation” itself implies a type of falseness—its aim to stand for, rather than to be. But really, the goal is neither a perfect representation of my vision, nor to pin down a glimpse of the asymptotic “objective truth.” With each scrabble and cut of a brush, I am trying to catch something of my perception of the world of forms, light, and space, but its re-creation is not the ultimate goal. While my brush follows, as if by way of a little string, the stuff of the world that I see, the expression inherent in manipulated paint, itself, cannot be ignored as an inevitable part of the final outcome. While the goal to which I tether myself is to bring something from the real world into the realms of a painting, I expect paint’s own manner to respond to my manipulations, but not simply or obediently comply. I define ultimate painterly skill not by command over, but rather by communion with the medium. In the partnership of our combined voices lies a potential for honesty far greater than that of my own, pure vision. Through the combination of command and responsiveness lies the fantastic thing, and magical thing, about the process of painting—discovery. Discovery lends the painting act new authority: rather than illustrating the view from my mind’s eye, I create (ideally) the picture of something I have never seen before, which makes the painting transcend its role of representation into the realm of true creation. A representational painting is no slave to whatever corner of the world it makes its subject: rather, there is symmetry between the truth of its fiction and what truth can be found in each of our own.

Further, in a painting, one can create a space that is simultaneously literal and not—a space that brings into harmony elements of “realism,” and elements that metaphorically approximate abstract qualities. Through painting, I may try to locate the ultimate truth of human experience, in taking into account the imaginative aspects of reality.