Artist Statement

I paint realistic ice cream cones and other sweet food treats because I want viewers to experience the nostalgia and joy associated with beautiful desserts from childhood. Trips to amusement parks or county fairs, happy holidays and birthdays, chasing after the ice cream truck or sitting on grandma’s front porch with a homemade vanilla cone covered in rainbow sprinkles -- I want viewers to be transported back to moments like these. Painting idealized versions of the sugary delights associated with these experiences provides a way to connect people to special moments in their pasts, without knowing the specifics.

Creating work with the goal of evoking nostalgia for happy times requires a great deal of imagination and planning. It’s not about what an object painted actually is, but rather what the ideal in our minds is. For example, a painting of a messy, fully melted ice cream cone will not evoke the same idealized memory of one’s grandma serving up homemade ice cream cones pretty enough for a magazine, with just a single fleeting drip flowing down the side of the cone. I try to find a balance between the two extremes of perfectionism and casual messiness.

When taking reference photographs for my paintings, especially ice cream cones, I often take hundreds of photographs before selecting one. Then I digitally manipulate the final photo to get it to look how I see it in my mind -- boosting or changing specific colors, adding drips from other photos, centering, warping, doing whatever I need to do to make the color work aesthetically and emotionally. I’m not just painting a sterile still life. Instead, I’m trying to capture the personality of the ice cream and evoke feelings in the viewer. Because of that, the imagery needs to take on some hyperrealistic qualities, presenting an ideal rather than straight reality.

I like the term magical realism to describe my work because the paintings are incredibly sophisticated in the realistic, technical aspect of the paint application, but they require and incite imagination. The actual subject never really existed. The paint is applied meticulously using small synthetic watercolor brushes in dozens of overlapping translucent layers on nearly smooth wood or Masonite panels. This process requires a great deal of patience, attention to detail and time. The result is a painting with a near flat appearance and little visible brushwork. The layering technique allows light to bounce through the colors, creating an illusion of depth in the paint. This is further focused by stark white-ish backgrounds that put the focus fully on the subject.

In my new body of work, coming in 2025, I'll be pushing the boundaries of both illusion and imagination with a Magical Realism Trompe L'Oeil series. My hope is to carry the idea of joyful nostalgia even further, painting objects that appear to be visually realistic, so much so that you feel as if you could reach out and touch them, and yet conceptually come straight from my mind.