My pictures are almost entirely figurative and painted in saturated, nearly raw colors. The people are friends of mine, models, and clients, but mostly friends. I paint from life, from photographs and from stories people tell me, or a combination of all three.

As a child, I learned to think of spiritual concepts more in terms of human figures rather than words. The idea of God made flesh, and this idea translated into something we can see and hold and shape, has stayed with me. When Picasso came across art from outside Europe in a museum in Paris, he began to see his own paintings as spiritual weapons. I believe that spirituality evolved alongside language and image-making to oppose selfish drives that would otherwise lead us to extinction. In that sense paintings can be survival tools, if not weapons, for keeping us at peace with the world: a world we stand outside of, perhaps in a way that animals lacking in language do not.