Camille Paglia said, “Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”

My painting juxtaposes my subjective understanding of contemporary conventions of beauty with evocations of its finitude. The paint itself; with its fluids, scabs, skins, and wrinkles, is my primary method to wander the borders between the order of beauty within and the boiling chaos without. The natural world is both the benevolent mother and the ceaseless destroyer. It is both transcendent awe and ‘the melting flux of nature.’

To seek out the beautiful is to seek out order and rationality as tiny harbours of safety in the larger happenstance of reality. These harbours have a clear benefit to our psyche but when done to the exclusion of the larger truth we are left wanting. Flawless beauty feels incomplete, fake, or saccharine.

The smooth expanse of beauty must be tempered with its negation in order to express a more authentic emotional experience. It is in this mire of contradiction that I point my brush.