I consider myself an American painter. I'll go further. I'm a regionalist right down to the neighborhood level. Very often, the subjects and settings of my work can be traced to my current home in Rochester, New York.

What I like to find and explore are aspects of American culture – our most common experiences, those facets our life that seem to hide in plain sight. I want to re-introduce them – boldly and dramatically.

The characters and themes I choose are larger than life, proportionately askew and vividly rendered. They deliberately haunt the borders of abstraction and iconography. I like that narrow, unexplored, even dangerous, margin between the pictorially representative and the symbolic, that place where a figure or object appears to be more than what it depicts, yet never becomes trapped and stuck in the static formality of allegory.

American life especially, I believe, teems with experience and events along this borderland. To encourage others to explore this territory, throughout my career I have experimented with incorporatingthree-dimensional objects into traditional surfaces, such as wood and masonite. I constantly seeknovelvisual effects by manipulating the interplay of flat paint and volumetric objects, trusting my own inspirations and recollections, dreams and longings, personal and shared experiences to fusedistinctive elements of primitive forms, children's art, and modern icons into a coherent visual experience.