Little men dream big. It is the discrepancy between their dreams and their reality which drive them to be creative. In my case this results in an output of colorful, semi-flat egg tempera paintings. Composed of thousands of tiny strokes, they range from notebook to table sized. I work strictly and solely from my imagination, keeping a fixed line between my ability to imagine and my ability to paint. These are rooted fantasies; I strive for vitality and believability in each painting no matter how improbable or ridiculous the narrative.
The spaces within the paintings look like overzealous backdrops for a lost Verdi opera; a farce about time travel, destiny, history, morality and mythology. These theatrical settings are populated by myself and other little men working to build their own fantasy worlds. Through force of will, my surrogates humbly cultivate their painted landscape and labor to form the essential relationships of their illusory world –we are working together, learning, acting.
Giving flesh to fantasy is what drives my creative process. I see myself as an advocate for the possibility of complex visual narrative in contemporary art. As the great Orson Wells said, "To work, a story doesn’t have to be real - it has to be true".