For years my artistic direction has grown from my experiences as a traveling artist. After returning home from a journey through the country of Turkey in the summer of 2008, I began a series in response to my travels. The element of this country that fascinated me both visually and culturally had been the imperfect beauty of dilapidated architecture. These scenes of decaying buildings not only possessed a feeling of lost memory and history, but also served as light, color and compositional studies. After many paintings depicting imagery I had gathered in Turkey, my focus slowly changed to sights of Wyoming that involved the same conceptual and visual qualities. I explored burned down factories, odd alleyways and the junkyards I had played in as a child. I was transfixed by the horrible beauty of lost, abandoned and decrepit spaces. As the body of work evolved, so did my method of working. I quickened my process; the paintings became larger and involved more texture. My painting professor introduced me to oil sticks, a material I found to be extremely vital to my studio process. The oil sticks allow me to block out initial compositions quickly while building a great amount of texture and gestural mark making. After the under painting is applied with the oil sticks, I work back into the piece with oil paint and mediums. I work back and forth between these two techniques allowing the painting to employ both drawerly and painterly aspects.

Working on these paintings provided me with experimentation and growth as an artist. For the past year I have concentrated on combining the techniques I learned with a new concept. In a recent series of oil paintings, I am treating animal subjects as iconic figures while relating them to Christian stories and themes. Concerns I have with our modern food industry, as well as my influence in Christian art, has inspired me to paint animals in a manner that will emphasize a sacred nature present within them. In numerous trips abroad, I was exposed to early Renaissance; Baroque and Neoclassical artwork. This exposure has had a profound effect on my artistic direction. Dramatic chiaroscuro is an approach I am utilizing to connect my work with the established style of the Baroque Counter-Reformation. I have also shaped several of my panels into Gothic archways in order to root even more firmly in the iconography of early Christian motifs.

In this series I am also beginning a connection between animals and children. This connection exists for the reason that both share a deep vulnerability in our world. Animals and children are first to feel the effects of human cruelty and both are defenseless. The portraits of children included in this body of work refer to this connection while suggesting a purity of their own.