“The background snapshot is from a time I went to a New Orleans cemetery. The foreground is three people at my friend’s birthday party. It’s celebrating life, and with the cemetery there’s this juxtaposition … I lost both of my parents. My mother passed away in 2009, and my son came in 2014. My father passed away last year. I’ve been thinking about life and death a lot, and how it just repeats. People are born, and then they follow this path that the majority of people follow and then die. We wake up; we go to work; we go to sleep. Maybe it’s our defense mechanism: We try to find beauty in that repetition of things, the stars, the seasons. I think [our ability to do that] is a really great thing about people.”
“Figure is the only thing I paint or draw, because I just like painting and drawing people. It’s not that I love people … they can be really beautiful and really horrible on the inside. It’s this good and bad thing everyone has. I’m curious about people, I think. Through painting and drawing figure, I feel like I can say stuff that I want to say.”
About the artist
