The paintings in "number racket" grew out of a series of oil stick drawings and also some marker drawings that I have been chipping away at for the past year. About six years ago, I started making tightly-wound, abstract paintings and drawings consisting of manic scribbles, stuttering marks, and blobs of color. When "working abstractly, you occasionally stumble into the representational, and there is the option to either embrace or destroy it, or side step it. I’d be working on a painting and letters and numbers would emerge, and I would invite them in, call out to them, until eventually I found a way to paint/draw these letters and numbers. You can write out letters and numbers and you can draw them, and I'm interested in that difference. Every painting I do is rooted in drawing, and I love dragging one wet line of paint into another. I put the paint on rather than scrape it down so I can build it thick then back up again, scribble them out and then repaint them, usually working wet-into wet. As paintings go they are simple enough, consist- ing of figure, ground, and contour, each a different color. The "figure" in this case are the letters and the numbers, and even those to me are not as important as the negative space shapes between everything on the painting. the color is there to activate the negative space. I usually try to paint until something unexpected happens, whether it be a color choke, mark, or just the overall structure of the painting.

I have three touchstones for this work: paul klee's beginning of a poem (1938), claes oldenburg oldenburg and patty mucha's soft calendar for the month of August (1962) and the pinball number count videos on sesame street (1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12") jasper johns might be an influence with the number and alphabet letter paintings, except for the stencils. One of my life pursuits is to develop a quality handstyle. I always find myself stuck in traffic and spacing out, looking at graffiti and billboards and various signage. I think about how the visual environment permeates the mind, how even though you might not be interested in graffiti or commercial signage, those end up mixing around in your brain just because it's everywhere, and then it comes out in the painting. i'm interested in the space where a painting navigates both internal and external landscape, where the tension between a hand and eye, with all its friction and awkwardness, becomes the terrain of exploration.