The Company We Keep
July 10, 2026 @ 11:32am - July 31, 2026 @ 10:32pm MDT
The large-scale oil paintings in this show portray characters in conversation, characters whose gestures, large hands, and expressive features help tell their story, as they invite you into their company. Gathered together, the paintings tell of women of a certain age, couples in a certain state, individuals in certain moments of certitude, serenity, joy, or bemusement.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint to try to understand people, relationships, and myself: inner lives revealed in outer forms, postures, textures, colors, and mark-making. I aspire to expose the many layers just beneath any true-to-life representation and to reveal the mystery and vitality of creating understanding.
John Milton, the 17th-century author of the poem Paradise Lost, advised us to “be lowly wise,” to try to comprehend ourselves and others with humility in the face of who we are as complex, enigmatic, sometimes confounding beings. Wisdom is about looking inward to perceive emotions, thoughts, values, judgments—all that makes us who we are as humans.
Some paintings tell a story or suggest one. The characters are meant to be evocative and expressive of some recognizable, perhaps familiar, emotional or spiritual state, worthy of being brought to light, color, and form.
Large canvases demand time and attentive commitment to the subject. Time allows layers of paint; layers yield depth of understanding as a complex, multifaceted character emerges. Hands reveal so much about a person—and some people’s hands seem to have a soul.
If my paintings hold a political ideology, it’s that trying to know and value other human beings may be one of the most crucial jobs we all have to do for the world. We need to do the work of looking and trying to understand why we keep the company we keep and what they might teach us about being human.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I paint to try to understand people, relationships, and myself: inner lives revealed in outer forms, postures, textures, colors, and mark-making. I aspire to expose the many layers just beneath any true-to-life representation and to reveal the mystery and vitality of creating understanding.
John Milton, the 17th-century author of the poem Paradise Lost, advised us to “be lowly wise,” to try to comprehend ourselves and others with humility in the face of who we are as complex, enigmatic, sometimes confounding beings. Wisdom is about looking inward to perceive emotions, thoughts, values, judgments—all that makes us who we are as humans.
Some paintings tell a story or suggest one. The characters are meant to be evocative and expressive of some recognizable, perhaps familiar, emotional or spiritual state, worthy of being brought to light, color, and form.
Large canvases demand time and attentive commitment to the subject. Time allows layers of paint; layers yield depth of understanding as a complex, multifaceted character emerges. Hands reveal so much about a person—and some people’s hands seem to have a soul.
If my paintings hold a political ideology, it’s that trying to know and value other human beings may be one of the most crucial jobs we all have to do for the world. We need to do the work of looking and trying to understand why we keep the company we keep and what they might teach us about being human.
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