He had a sense when he joined the marines that the country he was skying out of was a known locale, with a character that was exact and coordinate and that maintained a patterned feel. A thing you could get back with if you had a reason. But that patterned feel had gotten disrupted somehow, as though everything whole had separated a little inch, and he had dropped back in between things, to being on the peripherery without a peripheral perspective.

--Richard Ford
The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)

I'm interested in the power of realities that operate in the diffucult to define, grey area between the past, present, and future, between different culturally described groups, and between the conscious and the unconscious. I believe that in the "little inch" between things the local and the global and life and death have overlapped. I describe my paintings as metaphorical realism; I think of them as ambiguous, open-ended statements that are not arbitrary, but solidly attached to specific people, places and things. They represemt my personal experience, concerns and views; some are visions of provisional utopias, as well as cultural critiques. I paint slowly using thin layers of paint and small brushes, modeling colors until they reach a luminescent quality that reflects a heightened sense of realism, a realism that transforms reality.