Models of Painting is my framework for an ongoing studio project and body of work that began consolidating into its current form in 2024. This site is a record of that emergence: a material investigation that has been developing for over two decades, now surfacing across multiple threads simultaneously. What's shown here are the first fully realized works from each thread alongside studies and prototypes that map where each is heading. I think of them as proposals for images in a constant state of transition, moving between surface and structure, light and memory, object and signal.
A model is a proxy, a test, a proposition, something that exists in the space between the real and the imagined. The work exists in that in-between. Most of the works begin with found imagery, often from my childhood or some previous chapter of my life: film stills, needlework patterns, book covers, aftermarket car parts. Others return to a set of drawings made in the 1990s that continue to generate work across multiple series, sometimes lying dormant for years before finding their material form.
I'm interested in the currency of existing images: how they behave when they are slowed down, embodied, and turned back into an object. I'm building systems that question how images exist now—how they move, how they circulate, how they acquire value, how they persist.
I've been drawn to that transformational logic since I was a kid obsessively collecting puffy stickers. Fetish objects of the playground, geek currency, portable emblems of identity you could put anywhere, peel off, relocate. There was something about the puffy sticker that felt like self-recognition: an image with an irresistible tactility that was never quite the real thing, that attached itself to the world provisionally, that could be repositioned and recontextualized without leaving a permanent mark. I knew that feeling from the inside.
A decal is already an ersatz object: an image made transferable, attachable, separable from its source. It's a copy without a master. It behaves like a skin, a membrane, an interface—existing beside the real thing rather than being it.
The decals I use are coated in polyurethane, giving each one a body and a kind of atmosphere— less a flat sticker than a small lens, hovering just above the surface it's attached to. When an image undergoes this transformation, it becomes both more physical and more provisional at the same time. It has to be placed, attached, supported, given structure.
The surfaces carry a kind of screen logic—reflective, luminous, suspended—but are built from decals infused with image rather than fused circuits. In many of the works only a thin edge of the original canvas remains visible, like a bezel. The painting turns inside out: the canvas becomes the frame and the surface becomes the viewing device. I'm very interested in the switched-off screen, the place where an image could appear but hasn't yet, or has already disappeared. Our dependence on screens has made us blind to their inherent strangeness. I translate the disembodied experience of the digital—glitching, buffering, existing simultaneously as information and illuminated surface—back into material form. Light functions as a fundamental material: some works seem to emit it, some absorb it, some only reveal themselves when light moves across them at specific angles. The work is meant to be experienced with the body as much as the eyes.
Much of this comes from taking very serious ideas about painting and running them through vernacular materials and seeing what survives that translation. Sometimes I think of the work as being in formalist drag—it borrows the grid, the serial logic, the monochrome, the heroic object— but often I'm not quoting painting at all. I'm rebuilding objects from the world that had long ago absorbed those ideas into everyday interfaces: dance floors, control panels, decorative patterns. What emerges are proxy surfaces that carry image, memory, and structural signals at the same time. I think of them as artworks built the way images exist now.