LOCALITIES
My paintings explore how we pay attention to the world around us and the limits of our ability to fully see or understand it. I suggest that we grasp reality only in fragments, through careful attention to intricate details and fleeting moments. My work is deeply personal, reflecting on solitude and absence. Details of familiar spaces such as churches, hospitals, government buildings, and family homes often go unnoticed in daily life, yet when caught in the oblique, filtered light of dusk, they become charged with quiet meaning and unexpected beauty.
I am particularly drawn to interior, liminal spaces where architecture and light hold the complexity and fragility of the human psyche. Pressed-glass windows, mirrors, and reflective surfaces obscure as much as they reveal, creating a tension between interior and exterior, presence and absence, the known and the hidden. My paintings move between translucent, layered depictions of stark architectural geometry and rippling, vibrating impasto, reflecting this duality in both subject and technique. Through these scenes I aim to invite viewers into quiet, contemplative spaces where they can pause and reflect on the significance hidden in our everyday surroundings.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Pat Schneider, The patience of ordinary things.
