I paint ugly. I paint weird. I paint us as we catch ourselves in the bathroom mirror, naked, pimply-assed, and forgetting to suck in our bellies. Nobody is perfect and I celebrate flaws. I like distorting the flesh and playing with dramatic perspective and foreshortening to add tension. I also work big, really big. The scale helps me to create a sense of awe, or menace, or both. It also allows me to make bold, oversized, impasto marks whose mix of hues and textures take on a life of their own. I work primarily in oil because, as de Kooning said, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”.