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About my paintings:
My paintings make use of diverse approaches to understand how painting, not subject, style, or image, is a unique and specific carrier of meaning. I consistently place an emphasis on the painting's surface (by using many different kinds of paint and paint application) to make works that cannot be easily understood through photographs or reproduction to encourage viewers to seek out the singular object that is the painting itself. Rooted in familiar themes from the medium’s history my works may be still lives, figures, landscapes, abstractions or other combinations of these and I see little meaningful distinction between these. When I begin a painting, I start with a basic prompt; similar to a “MacGuffin” (a MacGuffin being defined as an object, device, or event in fiction that is necessary to a plot but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself). While the initial subjects or ideas behind my works may be personally meaningful to me they are also rooted in the everyday and often they are simply factual. When these subjects and ideas become part of my paintings the inherent physicality of painting takes root and begins to transform my initial intentions and meanings; turning the everyday into the fantastical and the familiar and factual into the fictional; this, I believe, is the manner in which painting is a unique carrier of meaning. All paintings are inherent fictions (which gives them an inherent newness) and they become so by transforming subjects, ideas and meanings (whether factual or not) through materiality coupled with activity within historical and contemporary contexts. I am interested in the subtle, indescribable properties that make paintings specific—their “thisness” or hacceities as the philosopher and friar Duns Scotus came to define them. It is for this reason that I utilize diverse approaches in my artistic output. I am looking for what is ubiquitous in painting, regardless of the way they look, while simultaneously trying to understand what each painting is and has become individually. A painting is fundamentally mystifying upon its conclusion; rarely do I know what a single work is “about”. I am aware of how my paintings came to be yet I do not fully understand them. Not places to confirm answers; I hope my paintings are appeals to look deeply and openly. M.S. 2021 (revised- Summer 2025) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Fall of 2025, as I prepared for an exhibit, I started taking notes on my phone to collect my thoughts leading up to the show. After the exhibit was over, I edited the notes down into the document below, "25 Aphorisms & Questions" 
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Writings about other artist's work:
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