I think of my paintings as quite ordinary, really. I have certain expectations for the images as I make them, but these concerns are often technical and rather unremarkable. I suppose that unsettled feeling you describe might derive from the quality of light being depicted, or perhaps the singularity of a given subject in the painting. My hope is that, in the end, I have managed to communicate something truthfully and with some measure of fluency.

I enjoy the idea of having the viewer insert him- or herself into the painting as the sole human element. In that sense, my images occupy a point-of-view perspective. Therefore, the figure is implied rather than being made explicit.

I often ask that same question myself. Perhaps it is simply the act of painting an object that assigns it further significance. I often paint an object because I think it would be an interesting experience. Sometimes the process becomes an intellectual exercise. Often the process starts with a rising sense of urgency, and then suddenly I feel that some object, the hammer in my studio or a bronze paper-weight for example, has a presence that is translatable to an oil painting. Any object or space can become pregnant with meaning if one spends enough time with it. My joy in the studio is derived from the time I get to spend with a given subject. A good painting session can sometimes be a thrilling experience, although those days are often few and far between.

I often watch films as sources for lighting. In particular, I enjoy Yasujiro Ozu’s black-and-white films from the 1940s and 50s. The films by Abbas Kiarostami are also a source of inspiration. In general, however, any decision to make an image with a particular dominant color is often guided by my singular desire to explore that color and see what kind of presence it has on the canvas. There is often really beautiful early morning light in my Philadelphia home throughout the fall and winter. You will often find this light in my paintings.

Actually, scale almost never shifts in the paintings. Part of the verisimilitude that I hope to achieve in the paintings is accomplished through exact scale. A glass of wine in a painting is modeled to the scale and size of its real-life counterpart. That goes for nearly every subject in my work apart from distant elements like buildings or planes, for example. The “disruption,” as you call it, happens through the act of painting itself, as painting is already a distortion of reality. Consider a finely rendered ermine in an Ingres painting, for example; he achieves a disturbing uncanniness through his remarkably obsessive technical virtuosity. I accept that the fundamental attribute of representational painting is the magic of discovering three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. This alone does so much to highlight the existing strangeness of the world. Within this strategy are countless possibilities for disruption.

I don’t think I ever return to failed elements from previous paintings. If I do repeat a subject in another painting, it is likely because I saw something interesting in the original image that I would like to reconfigure in a new way. Every painting inevitably falls short of the original idea. It’s rare that the painting eclipses the idea, as ideas themselves aren’t bound by the vicissitudes of real life. Therefore, painting is - or often can be - an unpredictable and sometimes disappointing experience.

The drive across the United States that my wife and I have been doing for the past four to five years has been instrumental in conceiving new ideas for paintings. Many images from the road - gas stations, hotel rooms, passing landscapes - find their way into paintings throughout the following year. The drive also gives me time to reconsider past work and spend time reading and thinking.

You are referring to my “date paintings” from 2025. There is a misconception that this work is somehow tied to the completion date of the works. That’s not exactly true. The dates themselves are randomly chosen, or rather, they have little connection to the production time of the painting. The initial idea for the work was conceived after seeing Eric Rohmer’s series of films, Six Contes Moraux. Rohmer includes dates before nearly every scene as a rhythmic device. On Kawara was also on my mind when making the work. I suppose the dates function as both a subject and an object within the images. Calendar dates can carry deep personal and cultural significance. For example, someone had told me that one painting had the date of his late father’s birthday and was therefore frightening to him. For another person, the same date was her wedding anniversary. By randomly selecting a date to paint, I relieve myself of the responsibility of "the artist's intention". I'm intrigued, rather, by the painting's capriciousness. Its interpretation and reception are always shifting, always conditional, like a playing card among a stack.

Memory and place are the raison d'être for billions of people throughout the globe. They are not merely the subjects of much contemporary art, but are the lenses through which we encounter the world. Therefore, when I made a body of work as a response to my grandfather’s painting, it felt very natural. Painting can be an act of love. My grandfather’s watercolor, and the exhibition I made as a response to it, was a gesture towards that.

I came across John Steuart Curry’s 1942 mural Freeing of the Slaves at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, during one of my cross-country road trips and was so moved by it. For years, I was curious as to how one might approach history painting in a contemporary context. Earlier that year, I had read Herman Melville’s poem “The Portent” (1859), which was written in tribute to John Brown after his execution. I had also seen Horace Pippin's John Brown Going to His Hanging (1942) and was struck by the fact that although eighty-three years separated each work, the image of Brown remained a potent subject for moral and political debate. The collective image of John Brown as the lean, self-possessed, and recalcitrant abolitionist was too labored an image to revive in 2024. So instead, I configured a suite of paintings around a simple hammer that I felt was a malleable and auspicious symbol for John Brown.

What I often think will be a potent subject can, at some point after the painting is made, take on an entirely new meaning due to a sudden shift in the cultural or political landscape. Because I work for the present moment, I am not compelled to anticipate how the paintings will be interpreted one hundred years from now. Though I often think - and worry - about the future, I have no way of foreseeing the world to come.

The history of art is filled with examples of paintings made within or in reaction to a crisis, from Francisco Goya to Max Beckmann. Santu Mofokeng's photography also functions similarly in the context of history painting. I suppose in this case, isn’t all art a kind of reaction to crisis? If you read Tolstoy’s essays on art, for example, a crisis can be as much a moral question as it is a political one. Painting is merely one tool - an imperfect one at that - for determining what subjects are worthy of illumination or examination. I have certain precepts in my studio that are determined by my character and by external political and moral values. Therefore, I do not consider myself to be a documentarian. However, I do live in a time where criteria of beauty and utility are fundamentally different from what they were in 19th-century Spain, for example, when Goya produced his images of the Peninsular War. Part of being an artist is determining what your immediate responsibilities are, and I believe it is wrong to say that, as an artist, one is responsible merely to oneself.

Most of the shows that I have made have demanded a strong sense of continuity throughout the individual works on display. It’s rare that I have twelve to fifteen paintings made, for example, and I only choose the strongest nine or ten to show. In The Passenger I devised a suite of paintings around this story of a man who travels, becomes ill, and dies. This was inspired by Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival, which in turn borrows its title from a Giorgio de Chirico painting. In The Passenger I asked my wife, the painter Lindsay Merrill, to paint an image of me as a corpse. I thought it would be interesting to have the titular work of the solo show created by someone else, like a coda or a shift in point of view. We both thought it was rather funny as well.

Our two-person show at Smart Objects in Los Angeles was an interesting collaborative experience. We’ve shared a studio for the best part of seven years, so generally our ideas about painting flow from one end of the studio to the other quite naturally. Manufacturing a discrete link between our work for a particular show can be challenging, though in general we share a lot in common. Often we find subjects for the other to use in the studio. For example, several of the bronze paperweights in my paintings were gifts from Lindsay with the purpose that I should paint them. Conversely, I send her snapshots of suburban American spaces I think would be applicable to her practice. We look out for each other in that way.

The Embarrassment is the title of my next show at Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Rome this fall, 2026. Having spent the last couple of years learning Italian, I was interested in many of the false cognates that the language shares with both French and Spanish. For example, in Italian the verb imbarazzare means to embarrass, as it does (roughly) in French: embarrasser. In Spanish, however, estar embarazada means to be pregnant. These have their roots in the Latin barra, meaning to restrict or obstruct. This bifurcation in meaning seemed like a potent analogy for painting and, more broadly, the political and ecological crises that plague our planet. I was struck by the visualization of the temperature anomalies of this year’s El Niño as a dark maroon band constricting the Pacific equatorial waters, jettisoning its heat throughout the rest of the world. Coincidentally, the name El Niño is attributed to the moment when the phenomenon peaks at the end of the calendar year, roughly at Christmas. My new body of paintings is a meditation on this correlation.

In the press release for my show Credenza at Stems Gallery, I said as much. I think I mentioned Tolstoy earlier. This summer, I read his polemic What is Art? and was struck by the concision with which he defines art - not only painting - as an act of conveying the truth, or what he calls the good. He asserts that art consists of one artist’s consciously transmitting to others “the feelings he has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” Simple enough. The good, however, is a concept that is composed from the “essence of our consciousness” and is therefore undefinable. Creating art as an act of faith, according to Tolstoy, is quite literal, as the good constitutes a proximity to the mystery of God. This logic is preceded by his chapters on beauty, which he argues is a dubious criterion for creating and interpreting art. Though this essay is dated (after all, What is Art? was published in 1898) and is born from Tolstoy's obdurate brand of Christian radicalism, I do find his argument entertaining in considering my own relationship to painting.

At this point, I only listen to old playlists or paint in silence. I think I’ve completely maxed out my patience for podcasts.

I really enjoyed reading the novel, The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, this past year. For non-fiction, I would recommend Andrew Delbanco’s book The War Before the War, which outlines the cultural, legal, and moral ramifications of the Fugitive Slave Acts among White Americans, Black intellectuals and religious leaders, state legislators, and fugitive slaves themselves in the years preceding the American Civil War.