My work explores the implications, limitations and individual perceptions of taste, beauty
and excess in both art and culture, while simultaneously exploring my interests in overindulgence,
visual complexity and ornamentation. It is a romantic and celebratory exploration into personal ideals
of the beautiful, and the play that exists between the natural and the artificial. I have always been
attracted to that thin and ever changing line that separates (and sometimes blends together) the
attractive from the repulsive and the beautiful from the ugly.

I locate beauty in the grotesque, the freakish and the unusual. This is the darker facet of beauty that
deals with the passage of time, inevitable demise and decay. I draw inspiration from the 17th Century
Flemish Vanitas paintings, which served as reminders that the power, the pleasures, and even the beauty
of this earthly life are transient compared to that which meets us after death.

I find a personal challenge in the utilization and manipulation of a multiplicity of languages and personal
imagery to form a cohesive and visually arresting work of art...a work that is striking, a bit unsettling and
yet seductive. My work utilizes real objects, paint as paint and paint as object to form unabashedly theatrical,
overly "sweet" (often repulsive) and somewhat sinister creations that express my own visions and ideals of
beauty and decay. These concepts of beauty, artifice, decay and life's fragility complement each other and
coexist in my work just as they do in the everyday world around us.