Certain images have a long history. They seem to have sprung from time immemorial and have evolved over the centuries collecting meanings and acquiring symbolic value like so many barnacles. Countless generations have recycled these images- sometimes mindlessly, sometimes with renewed intellectual vigor until they have become tradition; a sort of comfort food for the collective western psyche.

With the advent of the avant garde and our obsession with the new, these venerable Western traditions have been broken up, leaving pieces floating like so much flotsam and jetsam. They wash up in curious places: tenements in New York City, government buildings in Washington, DC, the dollar bill. These references remind us of something, but we aren’t quite sure what.

Over the past 20 years, I have appropriated - or at least staked claim to a handful of these images and have used them to examine my quotidian existence. Myth and memory, personal identity and cultural history are completely intertwined in this process of self-introspection. Here within the confines of the paintings, the mundane becomes the heroic and the personal becomes the universal. Along the way this journey references art criticism from Plato to Clement Greenberg.

In the end, the paintings and works on paper presented in this exhibition are a curve ball. They may lead you to believe that they are about a specific subject - a still life, a mythology, a landscape; one searches the canvas for a story suggested. Ultimately though, the paintings are about painting - the act of painting, the history of painting and the physical paint itself.