I paint and draw—mostly people, sometimes places, occasionally dogs. What drives me is the act of observation and the strange transaction that happens when you try to make someone or something still by translating them into paint.

Sometimes I work from life, sometimes from photos—found, taken, gifted, or entirely random. I like that the starting point can be arbitrary. What matters is how a subject stares back at you, and how that encounter—fleeting or charged—gets fixed in a series of impulsive, searching marks.

The relationship between drawing and painting is a constant thread in my practice. I'm interested in how one feeds the other—how the looseness of a sketch might bleed into a painting, or how paint can sharpen into a kind of drawing.

My influences are no secret. Alice Neel, for one, made pictures that feel like a cross-section of her times. I’m after something similar—an ethnographic portrait of now, told one figure (or dog) at a time.

There’s nothing particularly novel in the idea of portraiture. But the act of looking—properly, attentively—is radical enough. And maybe that’s what I’m trying to do: to look hard at the world and make something that looks back.