Snow Activities Still-life Paintings

My paintings begin with a serious sense of play, both in the staging and the creating of the compositions. It is at this beginning stage that I operate under the Dadaist dictate that “anything can be art”, and at the same time I seek out a balanced and harmonious composition by way of line, shape, and color. I work according to my whimsy, sometimes seeking to assert some form of narrative however personal or ambiguous, and other times I am simply satisfied with the hint of a human presence. Once I have my compositions the paintings then very quickly become about work, a very labor intensive work that forces me to focus my mind and slow things down (which I feel is relevant especially in this day and age of high-speed everything). A great amount of effort is spent on trying to get to the highest level of finish that is possible according to my current skill level. For inspiration I have drawn from the past four centuries of object specific paintings, from the ontbijtjes (laid tables) of the 17th Century Dutch masters such as Willem Kalf...