Paintings of Childhood Eccentricity

As a child I habitually imagined visuals to accompany the stories my mother read to me.  These paintings work in the opposite way:  their visuals suggest a narrative which the viewer is invited to complete.  The process of painting permits me to conceive and produce characters to which the normal laws of logic are rendered irrelevant.

The source material for the paintings is culled from photos of siblings and friends, and limited to images wherein the children are of such an age as to still be in possession of unedited imagination.  My own childhood, which comprised themed parties, uninhibited access to an abundance of costumes, and a fierce fidelity to fantastical figureheads such as Santa and the Easter Bunny, led to an inflated imagination and a desire to invigorate and animate all that existed around me.

Within my painting daydreaming children, party hats and the bizarre populate an entirely fictitious world of bedtime imagination and childhood eccentricity. Characters float ungrounded, tethered to one another in the intimacy of their shared moments of curiosity and discovery, indifferent of their disparities and completely at home with their oddities.  It is this democratic engagement of children with their surroundings that I find particularly compelling.