Some people call me a Surrealist, I am not. I don't paint dreams. Some people call me a Hallucinatory. However, I am not tiring to get you to see something I didn't paint. There was a time I was tiring to do this, but now my work seems to be more about the act of painting and the final image is secondary. I am concerned about the quality work of the final result but the end images come about by crystallization of thought at the time of creation.

What I do take from the Surrealists is automatic thought. I add emotion from the Abstract Expressionists and use the everyday as an inspiration. It is really important to understand that I "find" myself working this way. After years of training as a printmaker and trying to end up with a specific image in the end felt like I was becoming an illustrator, I felt constricted and predicable. I see Illustration as the process of creating with a specific final image in mind, thus the "sketch" and the preliminary works that lead up to a planned out painting.

I am a discoverer, I paint to see the image crystallize. If I think an image is becoming too planed out I paint over it, sand it out or randomly spatter, drip or texturize the surface with thick paint or add objects like nails. These "problems" cause me to think of solutions that steer the painting in an unpredictable direction, which in turn gives me results I never could have planned out nor thought up.