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Just over 50 years ago, I came across a book titled Private View: The Lively World of British Art.  In its pages, I discovered the work of Francis Bacon. Initially, I was captivated by the visceral shock of Bacon’s violently distorted figures, but as my understanding of painting deepened, I came to appreciate the formal tension between the physical surface of his canvases and the illusion of space they created. Bacon’s dynamic gestures—his slashing, spattering, and scraping of paint—produced surfaces that were alternately thin and thick, chaotic yet deliberate. His dramatically distorted figures, set against flat fields of color, retained a surprising sense of three-dimensional solidity while retaining a strong likeness to the individual portrayed.

Throughout my career, I have been drawn to artists who achieve a similar tension between the flatness of the picture plane and acutely observed illusions of forms in space. The linear energy in Alberto Giacometti’s drawings, where darting verticals, horizontals, and diagonals coalesce to define figure and space; the dense impastos and psychological intensity of Lucian Freud’s portraits and figures; the abstract yet spatially convincing landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn; and Jenny Saville’s portraits, which merge the gestural vitality of Abstract Expressionism with classical illusionism—all have profoundly influenced my approach. 

The illusionistic representation of my subjects is paramount.  In that regard, one might describe me as a “literalist”.  But the success or failure of the painting is ultimately dependent on that aforementioned tension, so I often feel compelled to disrupt the illusion with marks of color that draw the viewers attention away from the illusion and back to the surface.

In recent years, I have mostly concentrated on a series of very large portraits. Each one begins with a series of photographs, often as many as 100, taken while engaging my subject in conversation.  A few photographs are selected from which composition, color, quality of light and the attitude of the subject are derived. 

I then approach the human face as a complex terrain—its shifting planes of color bending and transforming in response to light. It often feels as though I am interrogating the flesh itself, searching for the lived history inscribed within it. That history reveals itself in the scars, blemishes, and other subtle irregularities that make each individual distinct, as well as in the stray strands of hair, the vitreous membranes of the eyes, and the glisten of saliva over teeth and lips. I prefer my subjects to be unadorned—unprepared for social presentation—so that their unfiltered presence can emerge.