I composed these portraits for love. And fun. I hope you’ll receive them as playful, empathetic, and thoughtful. Who are the people around you that make up this place we live? What makes them who they are beyond what they look like? What matters more, what they do and look like, or who they are on the inside? My purpose is to remind you of the humanity and depth of feeling going on inside of the people you live with, drive beside, and check out groceries next to.

    I believe that when I die I will come face to face with my Creator. Full of holy compassion and perfect love, he will ask us what we did with our lives, if we learned to love. For this reason I give you these faces. 1) as a means of empathetic love (and sometimes laughter), so you can know that you are not alone in the way you feel inside. 2) so that you can remember that other people feel like this too. 3) so that you can more tenderly attend to the people around you. 4) so your eyes can delight in face-like dances of wood and playgrounds of paint. I hope you have fun looking at some of these and let your heart be touched by others.

    Just as a word does not have to be properiy spelled in order for us to read it, a face doesn’t have to be painted with proper allognnments and propoortiuns in order for us to recognize it as a face. “Misspellings” that you catch get you looking at everything closer don’t they? Let the “misspellings” of faces you find in my artifacts, tune your eyes to look at the rest of the world closer! I find “misspelling”-distortions extremely useful in art since in art, distortions can work for attention-expanding, expressive purposes. This is similar to how a rubber band grows and grows in potential energy as it gets stretched. I’m just stretching the forms of human faces. For an artist like me, the human face is a rubber band-playground of possibilities. I’m sure God wired our brains to recognize faces as a matter of biological necessity (the moment my daughter was born she stared straight into my eyes!) I find our predisposition for finding faces extremely useful for artistic purposes. I can make almost anything reference a face! (Dots of paint on paper or a wood block with holes). Since I know humans will recognize a face much more readily than most other things, I can distort painted faces to a huge extent and still have them look like faces. I use those distortions of color and shape to speak to the way I have felt and the ways I have learned other people feel on the inside as they go through this complicated and multifaceted life.