My work is an attempt to capture a topography�a terrain, either of the land or of the human face, that never quite existed and yet has always been there. These are places and figures where I begin to arrive at an answer, and then find myself entering into a new geography of further questions. I see my paintings as thresholds that pull us out of ourselves and at the same time connect us to the deep processes of the earth and of our shared human experience. While my paintings are attempts to make incarnate something beyond, they are also deeply concerned with matter, with materiality. I find refuge in the materials themselves�paint, chalk, stains, plywood, mortar, plaster, burlap, twine, canvas. And I find refuge, as well, in sanding and grinding, in welding with a cement wash, to blend the fragmentary materials, to hide the seams, and to thus create unified compositions. These compositions are hinges between the figurative and the non-figurative, the concrete and the illusory. I want to find in the materials themselves an interrelatedness, and to reveal those connections in the paintings. To evoke in us, upon that threshold, the sense of being both displaced and known.