Using my studio as subject matter, I make paintings about perception, space, and image making. I am an observational painter at heart, and I struggle with a rift that has formed between what is felt and what is expressed in my paintings. The excitement and spontaneity of the first fleeting glimpse has always been my inspiration and impetus for image making. The seeming impossibility of capturing that ephemeral moment without merely illustrating it has led to my current work. How does the artist capture a fleeting glimpse using a process that spans over many hours, days, or even weeks? I investigate this question through my paintings, which often consist of many layers of failed attempts to capture specific moments. Imbedded in nearly every painting are several views of the objects and interior of my studio. In this sense the paintings are tangible documented histories of their own making, as honest and open as possible. During the paintings’ construction, a steady stream of new imagery constantly intrudes on the old, creating jarring juxtapositions. The resulting images simultaneously contain everything and nothing, creating a new visual realm which transcends the sum of its parts. The layered nature of these paintings inherently must accept and celebrate spontaneity and chance. My love of naturalism and depiction melds and clashes with flatness and abstraction. The studio has become a space to celebrate contradiction. Employing a combination of intuitive and analytical modes of working, the paintings are flat surfaces full of depth, both mysterious and ordinary, smooth and rough, graphic and atmospheric; all contributing to a kind of nowhere place devoid of conventional logic. Objects crystallize and disintegrate in ways that relate to remembrance and forgetting, production and erosion. The images produced are busy and precarious, reflecting the intense and impermanent nature of our visual world and the impossibility of grasping it in its entirety.