Painting allows me to make emotions visible and give them tangible physical presence - to look at my own experience, and search for compassionate insight into human behavior. I look at the emotion held in faces and interrogate the cultural and personal significance of physical gestures. My pictorial vocabulary grows as I study the connotative properties of body language — observing for example how the subtle angle or contortion of one figure’s spine in relation to another can imply a range of emotional experiences or even suggest the disparate states of desire and contempt. The creative process requires idle reflection, demands making mistakes, and leads not to one, but a plurality of possible answers to any given question — imperative antidotes to the greed and speed lauded in a contemporary culture that mostly trivializes emotion.