When I was a child my parents sent me to Saturday classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. At that age my conception of art had been based on illustrations and comic books. Discussions of form and space and wandering through the museum left me feeling that there was something larger and more mysterious just beyond the mere appearance of things.

In my college years I became even more aware of ideas of form and space until they seemed interchangeable. The images that I was producing were becoming more exaggerated and disappear- ing from the surface. The growing need to explain my work seemed contrary to my desire to create images of the real.

I returned to a study of traditional methods of representation. The irony of the use of illusions to get to reality made me look closer at the modernists and their concepts of material realities.

It was during my time at the New York Academy that I realized the philosophical gap between myself and classical realism. The nude was only naked and the naked body more often than not expressed its sexuality. What remained constant was the desire to possess beauty or rather art and the body expressed desire. The creative act was the link: the acceptance of the visceral form. I began considering form, space and the painted object as the strategies of possession of the illusionary image.

My work is formost concerned with the real. I address ideas of illusionary representation and the realities of the painting as object. I am putting together the pieces based on a clear foundation in the western tradition of picture making while building on the ideas and structures of the modernists.

I work principally from the human figure - not so much as a narrative element but of one of design and as a motif that brings with it indelible symbols and metaphors.

In the past my work has been about traditional form and presence of the figure. I then went on to explore sexuality and the perception of the painting. My recent work deals with issues of age, the flesh, distortion and the representation of the figure within the confines of formalist concepts.