Artist's statement:

You all know the Shakespearian line, "Nothing will come of nothing," right? A deceptive, seemingly simple line really. "Nothing will come of nothing," sure! This is King Lear replying to his daughter, Cordelia's refusal to add pomp to her affections for Lear.
But in this first scene of the play, Lear is also introducing himself as a fool, because of course a great deal comes about from that first 'nothing'. A wake of human drama, disinheritance, deception and seduction, greed and revenge, madness, and death lies within those pages as proof. So, "nothing will come of nothing" has an alchemical
esotery to it.

To me, this makes a fine analogy for the tradition of painting. In painting you have a canvas or panel or whatever surface you are working with. From the point of visual intrigue or physiology, nothing. Then the painter takes his paints and oils and various
mediums, and through a process of hand to eye prowess he covers that surface. But again, physiologically, spiritually speaking, the painter has only covered nothing with nothing. And this, my friends, is where I introduce my attitude toward aesthetics and craftsmanship. I've watched painters haphazardly spill their paints, splatter them around,
make great messes, and still end up with nothing more than nothing. However, a skilled hand attached to the right nervous system can elevate the very same materials, the very same nothing, to the loftiest heights of human revelation. He can create images that bring our great philosophical obsessions out into the stark light of observation. . . and all out of nothing!

In painting I am not interested in abstract art, or sentimental art, or childish art, or political art, or pop icons, or graffitti art, or post-Picasso laziness, or what you watched on television when you were a kid, or any other such bullshit. None of that matters to
me. Without the least hint of apology I tell you, to me it's nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No, in painting I am interested in exactly this: the fantastic images that are there to be culled forth from the immensely fertile depths of the creative,
neurotic-like mind. Images rendered with as much care, competence, and craftsmanship as possible for a precise, concrete representation of the treasures brought up from those paranoiac depths. Sacred or profane, these images assure endlessly new, and enigmatic objects and landscapes reflecting all the seductive, terrifying elements of existence. The inarguable forerunner of the senses is the eye. We are primarily an optically reliant species. So, as pictorial illusionists transforming nothing into artifacts of spiritual sustenance, I'm holding the painter up, not just as an admirable tradesman, but much much more. He resides as a high-priest over that all-devouring human reality, a conducting channel through which nothing triumphantly becomes something.

-LHR, 07.21.05, SF