It’s impossible to predict in media res what paintings will prove to be important directional shifts and which mere phases of fancy, but looking back, it is not at all overly dramatic to say that the “Resurrection of Flight” series is “what started it all,” when it comes to my signature combination of hyperrealism with stylization and abstraction. It began my junior year in college with an assignment to create a palette knife painting. Even then, I knew I was an implied rather than an applied texturalist, so I wasn’t excited about gooping thick paint on a canvas directly from the tube. M y efforts won praise with everyone but me, and after the assignment was graded, I resolved to paint the whole thing out. My plan was to heavily re-gesso the piece, then sand the heck out of it, hoping that the gesso would fill in the cracks and grooves in the bumpy surface, and I’d eventually level the canvas into a useable, smooth substrate again. What I discovered as I sanded, however, was the dark, random, abstract shapes of the knife painting emerging from the white of the canvas. It was so evocative and spontaneous it sent me in an entirely new direction. Eventually I painted an Oriole in flight (which I’d taken from a mounted specimen at the Oakland Museum) as if it were bursting through this non-objective space. My mother suggested the title “The Resurrection of Flight” because the piece not only represented the revivification of the dead bird, but also the rebirth of a less than brilliant painting into something I was happy with.

For several years, every time I would really botch a piece, the board would not go to waste, but instead become the foundation for another Resurrection of Flight. This is the fifth, and last, to date. Eventually I began using this technique more deliberately, and before long, I was able to guide an otherwise random process with some predictability of results. Today, these impasto under paintings are the first stage in every painting, and can be enormously complex and time consuming.