2026

These paintings were made during a year that often felt governed by war, distraction, and accelerating technological change. My students had to be pulled away from their phones while many of us watched, as in Marc Maron's memorable phrase, an "unfuckable" group of tech elites promised to remake the world through artificial intelligence. That atmosphere became the weather in which this work was made.

Some of the paintings are devoted to animals. I love them, from insects to whales, and find in them many of the qualities I wish humanity embodied more fully. Again and again I returned to the idea of murmuration: thousands of individual creatures moving as one, like music made visible. I began arranging rabbits into these swelling formations. Whether or not it sounds political, I think of them as acts of resistance. Their scale reflects the scale of the feeling behind them.

I also painted a deer repeatedly. I had seen one standing in remarkable stillness, carrying a calm that seemed untouched by the frenzy around it. It possessed a kind of poise that I wanted to understand, and perhaps to borrow. Painting it became a way of keeping company with that quietness.

From there emerged the Nocturnes. I often find myself returning to childhood—not out of nostalgia, but because it seems to contain a peculiar intensity, a time of gods and monsters when imagination and reality remain fluid. I found that child again and again this year, most often asleep. I painted him so frequently that the works became a series. I call them Nocturnes, after Chopin's intimate compositions, works that carry extraordinary emotional weight within a quiet form.

The Bethlehem paintings grew directly from the Nocturnes. Imagine the camera shifting from looking at the sleeping child to seeing through his eyes. Suddenly toys become people, shapes become stories, and the ordinary world becomes completely transformable. Each painting is an act of play, a willing suspension of disbelief that I entered into as a painter. They are attempts to recover, or perhaps simply inhabit again, the imaginative freedom that may be the deepest source of creativity.

For me, painting is not a way of illustrating ideas so much as discovering them. I rarely begin with a conclusion. The work grows through attention, revision, and play until relationships begin to appear that I could not have planned. One painting leads naturally into another, and over time a body of work emerges that understands itself more fully than any individual image can.

Although these bodies of work appear different on the surface—animals, landscapes, sleeping children, and miniature worlds—they are all attempting to protect the same thing: our capacity for imagination, attention, and wonder at a time that so often asks us to become fearful, distracted, or numb.