For most of its history the painted portrait belonged to wealth. Sargent, my greatest influence, painted the people who could afford him, and contemporary painters like Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley have turned the tradition toward subjects it excluded. I work in their wake at a local scale in Western Maryland, painting the people who hold a community together. I photograph sitters myself, controlling light, garment, background, and composition in a single session so that neither of us endures the long sittings the tradition once demanded.

Photography can capture a likeness, but it cannot replace the interpretation and story a painted portrait carries. I paint because the people around me deserve a record of their existence that took time to make. The portraits are, in the end, a narrative of my relationships.

Beyond painting, I choose whatever medium carries an idea best, and material inquiry drives my experimental work. At Northumbria University I printed on an 1860s Columbian press, pulling compositions drawn from the photojournalism of the 2024 deportation coverage through a machine once used to disseminate the news itself, so that the repetition of the process echoed the cyclical nature of the violence it depicted. In ceramics I have built sculptures modeled on Victorian porcelain dolls, merged photographic and ceramic processes in cyanotype plates and carved sgraffito plates of iconic figures, work that borrows the linear quality of printmaking and gives me room to simply draw.