While most of my subject portraits are of persons no longer alive, their lives - their being - have cast luminous shadows much like starkly placed lights on a deeply darkened road showing us a way to proceed.

To suggest that we need such people among us today is to ignore the fact that many such people are in our midst. The portraits, therefore, celebrate their lives as well as the subject’s.

The likeness that I have attempted to achieve in these works is a likeness that reflects the interior life of the subject, the ways in which life has formed and deformed them. These are works of the imagination, at once illusive and fixed by the juxtaposition of the materials chosen for the paintings. I have selected wood to make tangible the line - the form - the skeletal foundation of the painting. Paint constitutes the location at which the interior and exterior worlds of the subject conjoin.

These are paintings of human beings, some of the people depicted have gained fame in their lives, some have lived unnoticed, yet all have shown brightly in the reality of their living.