PF: Who or what has influenced your work the most?
I’d say my influences are pretty varied but one quote from guston quote I think of a lot is, “probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.” Otherwise the short story, “The Eye,” by Nabokov and its allusions to the divided self is one that always sits in the back of my mind. Artists I like: Freud, Matt Bolinger, Manet, Morteza Khakshoor, Alice Neel. Thomas Nagel “the absurd.” Augury.
PF: Walk us through your creative process?
Most works start with drawing. Drawing from the world, drawing friends, drawing things I see, drawing diagrams, drawing from the internet a lot. Compositions for paintings often come to me in the moments before sleep when I let my mind wander and latch onto ideas. Often they come entire and sometimes in part, from there I try to reconfigure the drawings I have or make more drawings to fit the image in my mind.
PF: What do you want people to feel or take away from your art?
It changes from work to work, but the main feeling I guess is the feeling of dissonance between being a part of the world, a product of it, fully ingrained within its mesh, and being apart from it: separated by the film of consciousness. What lets me experience the world is what separated me from it. I also am interested in the world as an infinitely interpretable web of meaning of which one can you experience only the surface.
PF: If you could have dinner with any artist who would it be?
Philip Guston for sure