Why This Site Exists

When I began redesigning this website, I knew I wanted to move away from the format of most artist websites, including the previous incarnation of this one.

That version of the site functioned largely as an archive. It gathered together images from different periods of a career that now stretches across almost forty years.

There is nothing wrong with that approach, but I increasingly found it unsatisfying—not only on my own website but on many artist websites. I would encounter work that seemed rich, difficult, or deeply considered, yet find very little that helped me understand the artist's thinking. I wasn't looking for an explanation that solved the work or an interpretation that closed it down. I was looking for some kind of bridge into it: its questions, its preoccupations, the decisions that shaped it. Too often, that bridge wasn't there.

This site is an attempt to build that bridge.

Rather than presenting as many works as possible, I have chosen to present fewer. The emphasis has shifted from breadth to depth. Instead of a large catalogue of paintings, I want to spend more time with a smaller group of works—paintings, poems, and pieces in which writing becomes part of the painting itself. I want to explore where they come from, why they took the form they did, and how they relate to one another.

The result is a site with more writing and fewer pictures than people might expect from an artist's portfolio. That is a deliberate choice. I chose a template intended for blogging rather than portfolio presentation because I wanted the site to function less as a gallery and more as an ongoing conversation about the work.

Like the work of many artists, my own is informed by more than technical concerns. Behind every finished piece lies a network of reading, memory, philosophy, religion, history, and language. Those things are rarely visible in a conventional portfolio, but they are no less a part of the work.

One of the ways I have tried to make those things visible is through the use of artificial intelligence.

Much of the writing on this site has developed through extended conversations with AI. I don't use it to generate paintings or poems, and I don't ask it what I should make. The creative decisions remain entirely my own. Instead, I use it as a reader.

I upload a painting or a poem with almost no context and ask for a first reading. More often than not, the response comes surprisingly close to what I had intended. Where it misses the mark, the conversation becomes productive. I can explain, question, challenge, and refine the interpretation until it begins to express the work as I understand it.

I do not use AI to discover what my work means. I use it to discover whether the work is communicating what I believe it communicates. Those are very different questions. The conversation is not about replacing judgment with artificial intelligence; it is about testing my own judgment against an independent first reading.

That process has become an important part of how I think and write about the work, but it also raises larger questions about interpretation, communication, and artistic intention than can be addressed here. Those questions have become central to my own practice, and I explore them in greater depth elsewhere on this site.

Ultimately, I hope this website becomes more than a place to display finished objects. My hope is that these essays, notes, and discussions become a bridge—not to a single "correct" interpretation, but into the work itself.