Art can change how we look at our surroundings. The representations we see in art challenge not only our shared, if rarely articulated, notions of legitimate representation, but also what we perceive as interesting, or relevant to our culture, as beautiful in itself. My goal in painting is not to represent objects in the world, but to call attention to the act of seeing that makes representation possible. My paintings are field notes from a life. Taken together they are a necessarily incomplete account of my observations on what it means to be a human in the world, set down in shapes and lines, colors and textures. For the past ten years I have explored through painting the relationship between what is on, and what we perceive as being on the canvas. In my most prominent series I paint my way into unfamiliar territory, abstracting the ground of the canvas. I survey the canvas, isolating within it areas suggesting discrete images. I then paint around the edges of these images to reveal them through a figure-ground reversal. These isolated images are, to me, extremely important. They are an object lesson in how we perceive our reality. The difference between signal and noise amounts to an act of framing, an internal act motivated and not constrained by the external. These inscriptions reveal meaning and order as functions of the mind. They are studies in differentiation. Through my paintings I try to represent and distill the human compulsion to make pictures, and to record the experience of seeing, of recognizing images in random patterns and textures. My paintings also celebrate the delight that accompanies this recognition, the combination of surprise and satisfaction of seeing differently from one moment to the next. In so doing, they gesture toward archetypes, the images we share, but which escape articulation. My paintings isolate and express the deeply human feeling that what we see is ours and everyone's, that we are the first of many witnesses to a reality ever unfolding