Vanitas Paintings
(2012 - present)

In 2012, I started an ongoing suite of monochrome paintings made of enamel spray paint on canvas and highly decorative frames. The works fuse painting and its formal presentation into a single visual experience and examine perceived issues of taste and authority within the theater of an exhibition space. These first works in this series produced between 2012-2014 were specifically informed by Dutch vanitas / still life painting of the 16th-17th centuries, Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic paintings from the 1920s-1940s, and the Radical Painting Group active in NYC during the 1970s-1980s, plus my work running MINUS SPACE for more than 20 years.

The newer works in this series, which were conceived over the past five years after moving from Brooklyn to South Orange, New Jersey, and completed during the summer 2024, are all made with vintage frames (some damaged) that I scrounged up in thrift, second-hand, garage / yard / estate sales, and antique stores here in NJ. The paintings are primarily horizontal / landscape format and the colors reference those found in the works of various Hudson River School painters, such as Asher B. Durand, George Inness, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, and others, who were active around these parts more than a century ago.