Piece of Me, 2006
Piece of Me is a self-portrait that I painted on 192 individual 4"x4" canvases. Each canvas was meant to represent a piece of myself while also being unique enough to be interesting individually. In order to make each canvas interesting, I etched self-reflective words into the background canvases, and I used unusual brush strokes, shapes, and mark making within the portrait part of the painting.
Lucky Numbers, 2010
Lucky Numbers was designed and intended to be the same conceptually, as my painting Piece of Me.
Epiphany, 2007
Epiphany is a 48"x48" black and white self-portrait on canvas with a black and white video inlay where the left eye would be. In that video, my eye moves around, looking this way and that way, and it only blinks twice. When my eye blinks the first time, the video turns to color. A second later, it blinks again and returns back to black and white.
In addition to the video, Epiphany has words etched into the background. Those words are culled from various sources, some of the words were mine, and many came from elsewhere. The sources I culled the words from were intentionally random. This was done in order to set up a metaphor.
That metaphor was this; you never know when inspiration might strike or where it might come from. One minute you could be lost, unable to figure something out. Then in a blink of an eye, as if out of nowhere, everything becomes clear. That is an epiphany, and that is the meaning of this painting.
History I, 2008
History I is a self-portrait painted on the covers of history books. The books were a set of general encyclopedias, and I chose to paint on them as a metaphor to express the idea that everything inside us which is not occurring in the present must have occurred in the past. Who our ancestors are, where we come from, what we've done and how we've done it, all of those things make us who we are today.
I And I, 2005
I painted I and I while I was struggling emotionally. I was having regular high highs followed by low lows. I would slip in and out of suicidal thought, then later I would feel unstoppable. I knew there was something wrong with me.
My entire life I've been against medication. If I had a psychological problem, then I was determined to live with it or solve it on my own. As a way of understanding my condition, I began to make art about what I suspected was wrong with me. This painting is one of the artworks I made. It's a self portrait set in stark darkness. My face is split down the middle, one side is warm, and the other side is cold. For me, the warm colors in this painting represented the happiness of the highs I was feeling, and the cold represented the sorrowful and angry feelings I had during the lows.
