THE SPOOKINESS of representational art always attracts me—pictures that cast a spell on the unwary. I’m interested in various kinds of dislocation and disorientation, a visual disabling that makes people pause to reconsider what they are looking at.

I begin any new series of paintings by collecting images that share a theme or a look. My sources have always been kind of the same: newspapers, magazines, mass media of all sorts, as well as more esoteric art worlds. I love mining the lesser-known byways of art history. I’m interested in what’s already circulating in the collective unconscious, and trying to make some sense of that at any given moment. Typically I’ll see something that strikes a chord and I’ll clip it, download it, or whatever needs to be done to it, and then I’ll pin it on a wall. A few other pictures will gather around it and then they begin to migrate into a folder, and then back to the wall, and finally into drawings and paintings. Read More